Definition Essay: A History Of Emotion

When you hear emotion, what do you think of? It is usually the feelings you get when a specific event occurs. It is natural to have thought of the feelings of sadness, anger, fear, joy, or scared, It would have never crossed my mind that the word emotion used to mean something completely different. We will explore, in depth, the history, the interesting aspects, and why I choose the word emotion. The meaning of emotion has shifted drastically over time. In the 1570s, the word had the meaning of “moving, stirring, agitation”(Online Etymology Dictionary). It was actually in the 1650s when the word again changed to “a sense of strong feeling” (Online Etymology Dictionary). In the academic journal, “Toward a History of Emotion” by David Thorley, it explains an alteration to the word emotion, “The culture shift from passion to emotion that took place between classical and scholastic uses and Enlightenment thinking has been well documented, with most scholars recognized the early modern period as a phrase of tradition”(Thorley 3).

In Old French, emotion was spelled emouvoir. If you translate the Old French spelling it would mean, “stir up”(Online Etymology Dictionary). The Middle French had a similar spelling to today’s way of spelling emotion, it got spelled like “émotion” (Online Etymology Dictionary). There is another spelling that is from Latin, “emovere, which means to move away, or remove and agitate”(Online Etymology Dictionary). Emotion was originated from theses different forms of spelling. It is easy to understand how emotion used to mean motion, the spellings had a considerable part in