Standard Lemma guide
Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.
Sound
Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.
noun
Vicarious joy associated with seeing one's partner have a joyful romantic or sexual relationship with another person.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: neologism, uncountable
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
noun
The feeling of joy one has experiencing another's joy, such as in witnessing a toddler's joy and feeling joy in response.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: neologism, uncountable
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
History
Coined in the early 1990s by a group of members of the Kerista Commune, a polyamorous group based in San Francisco, California, U.S.A., in existence between 1956 and 1991, apparently randomly using an alphabet board (similar to a Ouija board), with -ion (suffix forming nouns). The hypothesis that the word is derived from French compère (“partner”) + English -sion (a variant of -tion (suffix forming nouns)), based on an earlier use of French compérage by the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) to denote the practice of brothers-in-law sharing wives observed among Tupi people of the Brazilian Amazon, is less plausible: a website run by former members of the community states that neither the word compérage nor Lévi-Strauss’s work was known to them at the time, and the formation of the word in this way does not correspond to any known morphological process.
Across languages
11 source translations are retained for this English entry.
