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Understanding vs Sympathy - What's the difference?

understanding | sympathy | Related terms |

As nouns the difference between understanding and sympathy

is that understanding is mental, sometimes emotional process of comprehension, assimilation of knowledge, which is subjective by its nature while sympathy is a feeling of pity or sorrow for the suffering or distress of another; compassion.

As an adjective understanding

is showing compassion.

As a verb understanding

is present participle of lang=en.

understanding

English

(wikipedia understanding)

Noun

  • (uncountable) Mental, sometimes emotional process of comprehension, assimilation of knowledge, which is subjective by its nature.
  • (countable) Reason or intelligence, ability to grasp the full meaning of knowledge, ability to infer.
  • (countable) Opinion, judgement or outlook.
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)
    • , title= The machine of a new soul , passage=The yawning gap in neuroscientists’ understanding of their topic is in the intermediate scale of the brain’s anatomy. Science has a passable knowledge of how individual nerve cells, known as neurons, work. It also knows which visible lobes and ganglia of the brain do what. But how the neurons are organised in these lobes and ganglia remains obscure.}}
  • (countable) An informal contract, mutual agreement.
  • (countable) A reconciliation of differences.
  • (uncountable) Sympathy.
  • All that people individually sense and feel of themselves.

    • See also

    * intellection

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Showing compassion.

    • Verb

    (head)
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-07, author=David Simpson
    • , volume=188, issue=26, page=36, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Fantasy of navigation , passage=It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in [the] basket [of a balloon]: […];  […]; or perhaps to muse on the irrelevance of the borders that separate nation states and keep people from understanding their shared environment.}}

    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)