List of Feelings: Feeling Words and Emotion Words in English
Learn useful feeling words and emotion words with pictures and example sentences to improve and enhance your vocabulary in English. There are many times when you may need to talk about how you are feeling, or perhaps describe how someone else is feeling. For this reason, it is important to be able to talk about the various emotions in English. You may also need to understand these emotion names in situations where someone is explaining to you how they feel, and by being able to recognize what they are saying, you will be better able to help them.
With this article, we will be explaining what feelings are and the difference between feelings and emotions, if that’s not enough, we are also going to share with you various positive and negative feeling words and a detailed list of feelings and emotions in English!
Feeling Words & Emotion Words
On Earth, there are currently over seven billion people and yet no two are the exact same. However, if there is one thing that we can find we all have in common with each other; it’s feelings. We all feel and we all go experience some difficulty at some point in our lives putting those feelings into words, as we still don’t completely understand what feelings really are.
What Are Feelings?
Feelings have been around for a very, very long time. However, we only officially succeeded to discover them around the 1830’s, thanks to Thomas Brown. That was also when the word was officially added to the dictionary with the meaning we still use today. As before that, the meaning of feelings meant something a little different. The word ‘feelings’ has two separate meanings; physical and emotional.
The physical side of the word ‘feelings’ was the first to be discovered and added to the dictionary, as a verb as it’s a physical thing. A physical feeling is what you feel physically, for example, the warmth you feel while you lay under the Summer sun or under a blanket during the harsh Winter. Another example would be, when you get too close to a flame or break a bone.
The emotional side of the word ‘feelings’ is an adjective and the one we will be focusing on in this article. An emotional feeling, is something you feel on the inside. This could be: happy or sad, angry or disgusted.
Now, when you feel something physically it can be a lot easier to find the words to describe it, as it’s physical. However, when it comes to describing emotional feelings, you’ll find that it can be a lot harder to do so. This is because we all feel differently and can sometimes confuse a feeling for another, this is completely normal and you may just find out why in the next section!
Emotions vs. Feelings
Despite it has been over two-hundred years since feelings were discovered, there is still a lot we don’t know about them. But it can be said that we have made tremendous progress in expanding our knowledge and we’re still not done. One thing people often get wrong, however, is the belief that emotions and feelings are the exact same thing. Now, they may be similar, but they are not the same thing, whatsoever.
The concept of emotions was discovered thirty years before feelings, around the 1800’s by Thomas Brown. Years later during the 1970’s, psychologist Paul Eckman, concluded that humans had six different emotions: happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise and anger. However, as studies continued, it was quickly discovered that, that number is a lot higher than first believed. Raising the number six to a shocking twenty-seven and debates that claim the total number of emotions are even higher that twenty-seven, are still taking place to this day.
Now that we know the story behind emotions, what exactly are they and how do they differ from feelings?
There is a reason as to why we say ’emotional feelings’ and that is because emotions are what cause feelings. Emotions are a physical response to our environment; this means emotions are aroused before feelings. And due to emotions being physical, it can be easy to identify them, with observation. Feelings, however, are mental associations and reactions to our emotions and because they take place in our mind, rather than our body like emotions, it’s a lot harder to identify a feeling.
For example, imagine you are scared of the dark and all the lights in your home go out due to a storm. Now your body will represent fear, your eyes are open wide and you’re moving slowly. But on the inside, you’re feeling cautious and worried, perhaps even nervous. Those are the feelings that come with that specific emotion. In conclusion, emotions take place on your body while feelings take place in the mind.
List of Feelings (from A – Z)
Here are some words to help you describe what you feel!
