Use apathy for a lack of interest, enthusiasm, or emotion, as in "voter apathy meant only a third of the town bothered to show up". Use empathy for the ability to understand and share someone else's feelings, as in "a good doctor needs empathy as much as medical knowledge". They're near opposites: apathy is not caring, empathy is caring enough to feel what someone else feels.
The core difference
Apathy is a lack of interest or feeling; empathy is understanding and sharing another person's feelings.
- apathy — lack of interest or emotion: His apathy toward the project frustrated the rest of the team.
- empathy — understanding and sharing someone else's feelings: Great teachers show empathy toward struggling students.
How to tell them apart
Apathy comes from Greek apatheia, "without suffering", built from a- ("not") plus pathos ("feeling") — literally, feeling nothing. Empathy is a much newer coinage: the psychologist Edward Titchener built it in 1909 from Greek empatheia, "feeling into", to translate the German word Einfühlung, describing the act of stepping into someone else's emotional experience.
A simple way to keep them apart: apathy starts with a-, the same negative prefix as in words like amoral or atypical, so think "a- for absent feeling". Empathy starts with em-, close to "in", so think "em- for feeling in someone else's shoes". The mix-up tends to show up in workplace or leadership writing, where a manager praised for empathy is sometimes typed as apathy by mistake — worth a careful proofread, since the words mean almost opposite things.
