FELLOW FEELING

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does fellow feeling mean? 

• FELLOW FEELING (noun)
  The noun FELLOW FEELING has 1 sense:

1. sharing the feelings of others (especially feelings of sorrow or anguish)

  Familiarity information: FELLOW FEELING used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• FELLOW FEELING (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Sharing the feelings of others (especially feelings of sorrow or anguish)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting feelings and emotions

Synonyms:

fellow feeling; sympathy

Hypernyms ("fellow feeling" is a kind of...):

feeling (the experiencing of affective and emotional states)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "fellow feeling"):

concern (a feeling of sympathy for someone or something)

kind-heartedness; kindheartedness (sympathy arising from a kind heart)

compassion; compassionateness (a deep awareness of and sympathy for another's suffering)

commiseration; pathos; pity; ruth (a feeling of sympathy and sorrow for the misfortunes of others)

compatibility (a feeling of sympathetic understanding)

empathy (understanding and entering into another's feelings)

 Context examples 

Yet such must be the impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions. Yet I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)