✅  Sympathy is the best word to refer to sharing someone’s emotions, especially negative or difficult ones (He felt sympathy for her pain).

✅  Compassion is the best word to use to refer to sympathy combined with a desire to help a person feel better or to fix a situation (She showed compassion for the victim).

✅  Sympathy and compassion are often used interchangeably, and the plural sympathies specifically refers to feelings of compassion (My sympathies for your loss).

✅  The key difference between compassion and sympathy is that sympathy does not imply the urge to alleviate the distress (While he had sympathy for them, it wasn’t his place to help).

Try writing a sentence describing something you have compassion for, with the help of Grammar Coach.

✅  Both adjectives describe something pleasing to the senses (the delicious smell of baked bread; a luscious red rose).

✅  Luscious describes something that is ripe, rich, or luxuriant (luscious berries; luscious hand cream).

✅  Delicious usually is limited to how something tastes, smells, or satisfies (delicious irony), and luscious more often describes texture, whether it’s food, fabric, or parts of the body (luscious silk; luscious hair).

⚠️  Luscious can have sexual connotations as well (luscious lips).

There are some luscious synonyms waiting for you!

✅  Sketch refers to drawing only the outline or key features of something (They sketched a quick portrait).

✅  Depict refers to representing something in a lot of detail (He accurately depicted a snowy scene).

✅  Although either can mean to represent something in art or in words, depict usually suggests the written word (The book depicted the last years of the king’s reign), while sketch is used more broadly (He sketched out his plans over dinner).

Now that we’ve sketched the differences, look at these synonyms for depict!