Jealousy Isn't Envy

Synonyms in the English language are all over the place. For a long time, it was useful to collect them in my mind, so I could swap them in whenever my writing started to get repetitive.

Instead of writing common for the third time, something could be ordinary. Instead of scholarly, an educated person was erudite. Instead of jealousy, so the thinking went, someone might be consumed by envy.

There’s only one issue: jealousy isn’t envy.

You might already know this, but I sure didn’t until very recently. This seemed like such a strange little gap in my knowledge that I wanted to dive in and find out everything about this difference. Welcome to my compulsion!

Let’s start with the easy part: clarifying just what the difference is. With envy, you want something someone else already has. This is the classic case of the wicked stepmother being envious of Snow White’s beauty she doesn’t possess, or Iago’s desire to have Othello’s peaceful life and hot wife, Desdemona.

It’s easy to imagine how envy can lead to murder, like in the biblical tale of Cain killing his brother Abel because God seemed to like Abel’s offering better. Wanting something someone else has can clearly cause negative emotions and actions.

Jealousy, by contrast, always involves a fear of losing something you already have.

While Iago is envious of Othello, Othello himself is consumed by jealousy, afraid to lose Desdemona. The wicked stepmother is envious of Snow White’s looks, but if she poisons another potential stepmother who is coming to take her job, she’s being jealous.

Cain kills Abel because he’s envious of the love God showers on Abel, but he’s also jealous of losing any good favor he has with God to his brother. Maybe you can start to see why there’s often so much conflation between these two words.

It’s easy for you to feel both envy and jealousy at the same time, especially if there’s a close relationship involved. Because both emotions can be all-consuming and intense, and both emotions tend to lead to negative outcomes for all parties, I have tended to put them both into the same category within my own mind.

I’m not sure if I was ever told that there was a distinct difference in the meaning of these words. I must have been told at some point, since I graduated from both high school and college, and ever since then I’ve continued to read and try to learn about words.

Every now and then, though, there’s one of those little gaps that slips through your life. The difference in meaning between envy and jealousy was one of those gaps for me.

Ever discover any of these little surprising gaps in your own knowledge? I’m especially interested in words you thought were synonyms, but turned out not to be.