emotion [M16th] The modern meaning of emotion is surprisingly recent and very different from its original sense. In the 16th century the word first meant ‘a public disturbance or commotion’, as in ‘There were…great stirs and emotions in Lombardy’ (1579). The root is Latin movere, ‘to move’, and the second sense was ‘a movement or migration’. The main current meaning of ‘a strong feeling such as joy or anger’ is from the early 17th century. The emoticon, a blend of emotion and *icon dates from the 1980s, but the emoji [1990s] is unconnected, being the Japanese word for ‘pictograph’.