Word of the Day

: August 31, 2025

simpatico

adjective sim-PAH-tih-koh

What It Means

Simpatico typically describes two or more people or things with shared qualities, interests, etc. It can also describe someone who is agreeable or likeable.

// Even though they weren’t always simpatico with regard to the direction of their company, the pair managed to be successful partners for more than 35 years.

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simpatico in Context

“From the early 2010s, when he was a young teen rapper in Chicago ... Chief Keef was flooding his Instagram with self-documentation, all of which is essentially gone now. Enter Eduard Taberner Pérez, an amateur archivist and professional graphic designer, who compiled ‘Sosa Archive,’ a limited-run art book that gathers several thousand photos pulled from Keef’s Instagram, presenting then in visually simpatico grids of 12.” — Jon Caramanica, The New York Times, 5 Mar. 2025

Did You Know?

Simpatico, which comes ultimately from the Latin noun sympathia, meaning “sympathy,” was borrowed into English from both the Italian simpatico and Spanish simpatico. In those languages, the word has been chiefly used to describe people who are well-liked or easy to get along with. Early uses of the word in English reflected those of their forebears, as in Henry James’s 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady, in which one character says of another’s dying cousin, “Ah, he was so simpatico. I’m awfully sorry for you.” In recent years, however, the word has gained an additional sense describing things or people who get along well or work well together.