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Clemency vs Sympathy - What's the difference?

clemency | sympathy |

As nouns the difference between clemency and sympathy

is that clemency is the gentle or kind exercise of power; leniency, mercy; compassion in judging or punishing while sympathy is a feeling of pity or sorrow for the suffering or distress of another; compassion.

clemency

English

Noun

  • The gentle or kind exercise of power; leniency, mercy; compassion in judging or punishing.
  • * 1601 , William Shakespeare, Hamlet :
    • For vs, and for our Tragedie, / Heere stooping to your Clemencie : / We begge your hearing Patientlie.
  • * 2010 , Priyamvada Gopal, The Guardian , 4 May 2010:
    • A death sentence for Kasab, seen to represent Pakistan, will be widely supported in a frenzy of righteous retribution. Presidential clemency is politically improbable.
  • Mildness of weather.

    • Related terms

    * clement

    sympathy

    English

    (wikipedia sympathy)

    Noun

    (sympathies)
  • A feeling of pity or sorrow for the suffering or distress of another; compassion.
  • The ability to share the feelings of another.
  • A mutual relationship between people or things such that they are correspondingly affected by any condition.
  • * 1997 , Chris Horrocks, Introducing Foucault'', page 67, ''The Renaissance Episteme (Totem Books, Icon Books; ISBN 1840460865)
    • 'Sympathy' likened anything to anything else in universal attraction, e.g. the fate of men to the course of the planets.
  • Tendency towards or approval of the aims of a movement.

    • Usage notes

    * Used similarly to empathy, interchangeably in looser usage. In stricter usage, (term) is stronger and more intimate, while sympathy is weaker and more distant; see .

    Antonyms

    * contempt (context-dependent)

    Derived terms

    * (l) * (l) * (l), (l)