bleeding heart

An excessively sympathetic or tender-hearted individual. The adjective bleeding has been used figuratively for full of anguish from pity or compassion since the late 1500s. Edmund Spenser so used it in The Faerie Queene: “These bleeding words she gan to say.” The cliché is much newer, dating from the first half of the twentieth century. I. T. Ross had it in Murder out of School (1960), “A lot of bleeding-hearts got the idea they knew about everything.”