Source — Cambridge Dictionary, Polish "litość"
- Title: LITOŚĆ definition
- Publication: Cambridge Dictionary (Polish–English)
- URL: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/polish-english/litosc
- Accessed: 2026-09-03 (WebFetch returned HTTP 403; a direct
curlwith a browser User-Agent succeeded, HTTP 200 — this project's standard fallback, per the standing fence) - Type: secondary/lexicographic (general bilingual dictionary), neutral.
Extract
Polish litość — cognate of Czech lítost, from the same Proto-Slavic root family (see wiktionary-lity-and-proto-slavic-descendants.md) — is glossed:
- "współczucie" (Polish synonym: "compassion/sympathy")
- mercy — "to have mercy on sb" (mieć nad kimś litość), sourced to the GLOBAL Polish–English Dictionary (K Dictionaries Ltd, 2018)
- compassion — "sorrow or pity for the sufferings of another person"
- pity — "a feeling of sorrow for the troubles and sufferings of others"
All three English glosses describe an other-directed emotion (compassion/mercy/pity felt for someone else), in contrast with Czech lítost's self-directed ordinary sense ("regret, remorse" — see wiktionary-litost.md) and especially with Kundera's literary elaboration of lítost as torment at one's own misery (see wikipedia-the-book-of-laughter-and-forgetting.md). This is this project's clearest documented case of a Slavic-family cognate pair that has drifted to opposite grammatical "direction" (feeling pity for others vs. feeling sorry for oneself) despite a shared root and superficially similar gloss words ("pity," "regret/remorse").
Gaps
- This is a single bilingual dictionary's treatment, not a native Polish monolingual dictionary or corpus study; Polish litość's own range of actual usage (does it ever cover self-pity too?) is not independently checked.
- Slovak ľútosť — reported by general searches to mean "regret/remorse," closer to Czech than Polish is — has not been directly confirmed against a Slovak dictionary this session (a stated gap, not a checked-negative result).