emotional vocabulary

[callunav]

To anyone who cares to answer:

What is the difference between 'sad' and 'unhappy' to you?

Comments

[redbird]

Sad feels more ongoing and a bit less energetic--if I had the emotion without any obvious-to-me cause I would probably use "sad."

But this also feels like one of those places where English has a larger vocabulary than we need, so synonyms or almost-synonyms are lying around.