From Latin 'emovere' (to move out, agitate) — originally meaning a public disturbance, not a private feeling.
A strong feeling deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others; an instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge.
From French 'émotion' (16th century), from Old French 'esmotion' (a stirring up, a moving out), formed on the model of 'motion' from Latin 'ēmovēre' (to move out, to remove, to agitate), from 'ē-/ex-' (out) + 'movēre' (to move), from PIE *mewh₂- (to push away, to move). The word originally meant a public disturbance, riot, or political agitation — it described collective upheaval, not inner feeling. The psychological sense of 'a strong feeling or agitation of the mind' developed gradually over the 17th and 18th centuries, eventually displacing older terms like 'passion' and 'affection' as the dominant word for inner states. The metaphorical logic is transparent: an emotion is something that moves you from within, that agitates the soul outward. The same Latin 'movēre' produced 'motion,' 'motive,' 'moment,' 'mobile,' 'promote,' and 'remote.' French 'émouvoir' (to stir, to move emotionally) preserves the verbal form. The semantic journey from street riot to private feeling is one of the most dramatic narrowings in English lexical history. Key roots: ē- / ex- (Latin: "out, out of"), movēre (Latin: "to move, set in motion"), *mewh₁- (Proto-Indo-European: "to push away, to move").
The word 'emotion' did not originally refer to personal feelings. In its earliest English uses (1570s), it meant a public disturbance, a political agitation, or a migration — all literal 'movings-out.' The psychological sense developed only in the seventeenth century, and it was not until the eighteenth century that 'emotion' became the standard English term for subjective feeling. Before that, English relied on 'passion,' 'affection,' and 'sentiment.'