emotion

Borrowed from Middle French emotion (modern French émotion), from émouvoir (“excite”), based on Latin ēmōtus, past participle of ēmoveō (“to move out, move away, remove, stir up, irritate”), from ē- (“out”) (variant of ex-), and moveō (“move”).

• (General American, Canada) IPA^(key): /ɪˈmoʊʃən/, /iˈmoʊʃən/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ɪˈməʊʃən/

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• Rhymes: -əʊʃən

emotion (countable and uncountable, plural emotions)

1. (obsolete) Movement; agitation. [16th–18th c.]
   • 1758, “Observations on a slight Earthquake”, in Philosophical Transactions‎, volume L, page 246:

     and the water continuing in the caverns […] caused the emotion or earthquake

2. A person's internal state of being and involuntary physiological response to an object or a situation, based on or tied to physical state and sensory data.
   • 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter V, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, OCLC 4293071:

     He was thinking; but the glory of the song, the swell from the great organ, the clustered lights, […] , the height and vastness of this noble fane, its antiquity and its strength—all these things seemed to have their part as causes of the thrilling emotion that accompanied his thoughts.

3. A reaction by a non-human organism with behavioral and physiological elements similar to a person's response.

• (person's internal state of being): feeling, affect

• appeal to emotion
• emotionable
• emotional

• emotion at OneLook Dictionary Search
• emotion in Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by The Keywords Project, Colin MacCabe, Holly Yanacek, 2018.
• emotion in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911