Meaning
Pleasure or amusement derived from someone else's misfortune, embarrassment, or failure. It fills a real gap in English, which has no single native word for the feeling. The register is informal to neutral and usually tinged with self-aware guilt; the English sense matches the German closely, though English use often comes across as lighter and more playful than the German term sounds. Playful but faintly self-incriminating; using it usually signals that the speaker knows the pleasure is petty. Regional use: General English (borrowed from German).
Origin
German Schaden 'damage, harm' plus Freude 'joy', literally 'harm-joy'; Schaden is a cognate of English scathe. The compound was current in German long before English took it up, and the philologist Richard Chenevix Trench discussed it for English readers in his 1852 lecture 'On the Study of Words', noting that many languages had coined a word for so unworthy a feeling. Merriam-Webster dates first known English use to 1868, while the Online Etymology Dictionary places the direct borrowing in 1922. It remained mostly an academic and literary word until the early 1990s, when popular culture - notably a 1991 episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa explains it to Homer - carried it to general audiences.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- shadenfreude
Usage Examples
- He felt a guilty pang of schadenfreude when the rival team's star player missed the decisive penalty.
- There is a certain schadenfreude in watching a smug influencer's carefully staged stunt go wrong.
- Her schadenfreude at the food critic's own restaurant receiving terrible reviews was hard to hide.