Source — Wikipedia, "Schadenfreude" (German)

Title: Schadenfreude
Author: Wikipedia contributors (unauthored, collectively edited, German-language edition)
Publication: de.wikipedia.org
URL: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude
Date: undated (live article)
Accessed: 2026-09-01
Type: tertiary — neutral/encyclopedic stance.

Extract

The article treats Schadenfreude as an ordinary German psychological/behavioral concept, discussed matter-of-factly as a well-studied emotional phenomenon — it carries no discussion of the word's own etymology or age, in notable contrast to the German Wikipedia articles this project has used for komorebi and wabi-sabi, which do discuss those words' own linguistic histories at length. This asymmetry is itself informative: unlike komorebi and wabi/sabi, Schadenfreude is not treated by German-language sources as a culturally marked or historically remarkable word — it is lexicographically unremarkable in German, the same pattern this project found for komorebi in Japanese.
The one explicit loanword claim on this page: "Das Wort „Schadenfreude" existiert als deutsches Lehnwort im Englischen, Französischen, Italienischen, Spanischen, Portugiesischen und Polnischen" ("The word 'Schadenfreude' exists as a German loanword in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish") — i.e. German Wikipedia's own claim is that the word's export is broader than just English, spanning at least six other languages by direct borrowing (as opposed to the Dutch/Swedish/Danish/Hungarian/Czech/Slovak words on file, which are independent native compounds with the same meaning, not borrowings of the German word itself).

No etymology or first-attestation information — this page cannot corroborate or contradict any of the three English first-use dates on file (Merriam-Webster 1868; OED-via-English-Wikipedia 1852/1867/1895; etymonline 1922).
The claim of borrowing into French/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/Polish is unverified beyond this one tertiary sentence — no source given on this page.