Pathos
Etymology
From Greek “pathos” (suffering, feeling, emotion), from “paskhein,” to suffer or experience. In Aristotle’s rhetoric, pathos was the appeal to an audience’s emotions, one of the three modes of persuasion alongside ethos and logos. English narrowed it toward the specific power to arouse pity and compassion.
noun · /PAY-thos/
A quality in art, speech, or life that evokes pity, sadness, or tenderness.
What it names
The particular pull on the heart of something touchingly sorrowful — the ache a scene stirs precisely because it is so poignant.
Example
The film earns its pathos honestly, letting the old man’s silence say more than any speech could.
Related idea
Overdone sentiment tips into bathos, an unintended slide into the ridiculous; genuine pathos moves us because it stays true to real feeling rather than manufacturing it.
noun · /PAY-thos/
In rhetoric, persuasion that works by stirring the audience’s emotions.
What it names
One of Aristotle’s three modes of appeal — beside ethos and logos — the deliberate rousing of feeling to move an audience toward belief or action.
Example
The charity’s ad leaned entirely on pathos, closing on a single child’s face.
Related idea
Where pathos persuades through emotion, ethos works through the speaker’s credibility and logos through reasoning. The general sense — a quality that evokes pity — is this same emotional pull seen from the audience’s side.