Source — Wikipedia, "Schadenfreude" (English)

• Title: Schadenfreude
• Author: Wikipedia contributors (unauthored, collectively edited)
• Publication: en.wikipedia.org
• URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude
• Date: undated (live article; accessed version reflects this project's access date)
• Accessed: 2026-09-01
• Type: tertiary — generally neutral/encyclopedic in stance, though see Gaps on citation quality for individual claims.
• Access method note: this project's first pass used the AI-summarizing WebFetch tool and its summary asserted two claims — a 1991 Simpsons episode and the Avenue Q song "Schadenfreude" — as if reported by this article. A second, targeted WebFetch prompt returned a contradictory answer (Simpsons absent, only Avenue Q). Per the project's standing fence on WebFetch/WebSearch synthesis unreliability, this project then downloaded the raw article HTML directly (curl) and stripped it to plain text for direct reading. Result: the Avenue Q claim is genuinely in the article (confirmed by direct reading); the Simpsons claim is not in this article at all — it does not appear anywhere in the raw text. The Simpsons material filed on the word page is instead sourced independently (see sources/quotesnet-simpsons-schadenfreude.md), not to this Wikipedia article. This is filed as a second confirmed instance of the standing WebFetch-synthesis-unreliability fence, this time catching a wholly fabricated claim rather than an accurately-reported-but-uncorroborated one.

Extract

All claims below were read directly from the article's own text and reference list (not summarized by an intermediary tool).

Etymology: compound of Schaden ("damage/harm") and Freude ("joy"); "closest word in English would be gloat." German mentions in English texts 1852 and 1867, first running-English-text use 1895 (cites "Oxford English Dictionary, 1982, s.v."); first attested in German in the 1740s, earliest known instance Christoph Starke, Synopsis bibliothecae exegeticae in Vetus Testamentum, Leipzig, 1750 (cites "Google Books," with the article's own footnote adding "the 1659 and 1700 dates are incorrect" — i.e. Wikipedia's editors are flagging that other, earlier dates have circulated and are wrong).

No single-word English equivalent, but many foreign equivalents: the article states directly, "Schadenfreude has equivalents in many other languages... but no commonly used precise English single-word equivalent." Named equivalents: Dutch leedvermaak, Swedish skadeglädje, Danish skadefro, Hungarian káröröm, Czech škodolibost, Slovak škodoradosť. This is the untranslatability claim in its most literal, defensible form for this word — not "the concept is foreign," but "many languages independently lexicalized the same concept as a single word or transparent compound, and English (mostly) did not," which this project's psychology-research findings below corroborate rather than undercut (see word page).

Epicaricacy: a "seldom-used direct equivalent," borrowed from Greek epichairekakia (ἐπιχαιρεκακία), itself first attested in Aristotle, from epi ("upon") + chara ("joy") + kakon ("evil").

Literary/philosophical tradition (each with its own citation in the article, not independently verified by this project except where noted):

• Biblical Book of Proverbs 24:17–18 (KJV): "Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth... Lest the LORD see it, and it displease him."
• Chinese: the chengyu xìng zāi lè huò (幸災樂禍) is attested from the ancient text Zuo zhuan, dated by the article to the late 4th century BCE, still in current use.
• Japanese: the saying hito no fukō wa mitsu no aji (人の不幸は蜜の味, "another's misfortune is sweet as honey").
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: epikhairekakia placed as one pole of a triad with phthonos (pain at another's good fortune, deserved or not) and nemesis (pain at another's undeserved good fortune specifically) as the mean between them.
• Lucretius, De rerum natura: "Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem" ("It is pleasant to watch from the land the great struggle of someone else in a sea rendered great by turbulent winds.")
• Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), quoted directly using the Greek term ἐπιχαιρεκακία within English prose: "...ἐπιχαιρεκακία, a compound affection of joy and hate, when we rejoice at other men's mischief, and are grieved at their prosperity."
• Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted (via a secondary source, Rudolf Lüthe 2017) as writing in Grundlage der Moral (1860): "To feel envy is human, to savor schadenfreude is diabolic." This is the only one of the three philosophers named on Merriam-Webster's Word-of-the-Day page (Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche) that this Wikipedia article actually discusses — Kant and Nietzsche are not mentioned anywhere in this article's text.
• The song "Schadenfreude" in the musical Avenue Q — confirmed present in the article, cited to a Genius.com lyrics-credit page.
• Rabbi Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, quoted describing schadenfreude as "the embarrassing reaction of relief we feel when something bad happens to someone else instead of to us."
• Philosopher Theodor Adorno, quoted defining schadenfreude as "largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another, which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate" (cited only "in Portmann, John (2000). When Bad Things Happen to Other People" — a book-length philosophical treatment of the topic, not itself read by this project).

Psychological causes and scientific studies (each independently citable to a named peer-reviewed study per the article's reference list — titles/authors/venues recorded here for any future session that wants to verify a primary source directly):

• Three hypothesized driving forces: aggression, rivalry, justice (cites Wang, Lilienfeld & Rochat 2019, New Ideas in Psychology).
• Self-esteem inversely correlated with schadenfreude frequency/intensity (cites van Dijk, van Koningsbruggen, Ouwerkerk & Wesseling 2011, Emotion).
• 2011 fMRI study, Cikara, Botvinick & Fiske, Psychological Science: Red Sox/Yankees fans show ventral-striatum (pleasure-correlated) activation watching rival-team failures.
• 2006 fMRI study, Singer, Seymour, O'Doherty, Stephan, Dolan & Frith, Nature: male (not female) subjects show pleasure-center activation watching a "deserving" target receive a shock.
• 2009 study, Takahashi, Kato, Matsuura, Mobbs, Suhara & Okubo, Science: envy and schadenfreude neural responses correlate; schadenfreude-response magnitude predictable from prior envy-response magnitude.
• 2009 study, Combs, Powell, Schurtz & Smith, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology: schadenfreude in political contexts depends on in-party/out-party framing.
• 2014 study, James, Kavanagh, Jonason, Chonody & Scrutton, Personality and Individual Differences: schadenfreude correlates with "Dark Triad" traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy).
• 2003 study (Leach, Spears, Branscombe & Doosje, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology): intergroup schadenfreude among German/Dutch football fans, sensitive to perceived legitimacy of the rivalry.

Neologisms built on the word: Skaddenfreude (Lincoln Caplan, 1994 book Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire, re: law firm Skadden Arps's early-1990s troubles); spitzenfreude (coined by The Economist re: Eliot Spitzer's fall); Schadenford (coined by Toronto Life re: Rob Ford); Gluckschmerz — displeasure at another's good fortune, a 1985 joke coinage by pseudonymous "Wanda Tinasky" later used in academic contexts (cites Hoogland, Schurtz, Cooper, Combs, Brown & Smith 2014, Motivation and Emotion); freudenfreude — joy at another's joy, an opposite-direction coinage (cites a 2022 New York Times piece by Juli Fraga); freudenschade — a "pseudo-German" coinage for sorrow at another's success, flagged by the article itself as grammatically incorrect German (the correct form would be Freudenschaden); Hebrew slang firgun ("happiness at another's accomplishment," cites Shoshana Kordova, Haaretz, 2014); compersion, a term used by polyamorous communities for joy at a partner's other-relationship happiness.

Gaps

• Several claims (Schopenhauer's exact quote, Adorno's definition, the Aristotle triad) are cited to secondary/tertiary sources within the article itself, not to this project's own direct reading of Schopenhauer, Adorno, or Aristotle — flagged accordingly on the word page.
• The claim "Schadenfreude is steadily becoming a more popular word according to Google" is cited only to a low-quality source (wordgenius.com) and is not filed as a claim on the word page.
• Kushner's book title (When Bad Things Happen to Good People) and Portmann's book title (When Bad Things Happen to Other People) are genuinely two different books by two different authors — easy to conflate; kept distinct here deliberately. The article's own footnotes additionally give inconsistent years for Portmann's book (2002 in one footnote, 2000 in another) — not resolved by this project.

Used in

• Schadenfreude