Source — Wiktionary, "schadenfreude"
- Title: schadenfreude (English entry)
- Author: Wiktionary contributors (crowd-sourced, unauthored)
- Publication: en.wiktionary.org
- URL: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schadenfreude
- Date: undated (live wiki entry)
- Accessed: 2026-09-01
- Type: tertiary (crowd-sourced dictionary) — neutral, lexicographic stance.
Extract
- Etymology: "unadapted borrowing" from German Schadenfreude, itself a compound of Schaden ("damage, misfortune") and Freude ("joy"). Notes the word "gained popularity in English during the late 20th century."
- Definition: "Malicious enjoyment derived from observing someone else's misfortune; counterempathy."
- Grammatically uncountable in normal use, though a plural schadenfreudes exists (corroborating the Merriam-Webster entry's separate plural listing).
- Lists near-synonyms epicaricacy (marked rare) and internet slang lulz; lists proposed antonyms confelicity (rare), freudenfreude (uncommon), and the borrowed terms naches (Yiddish/Hebrew) and firgun — glossed here simply as antonym-adjacent rather than defined in depth (see the Wikipedia source page for firgun's fuller gloss, "happiness at another's accomplishment").
Gaps
- Does not give a first-attestation date for the English word (contrast Merriam-Webster's 1868 and the OED-via-Wikipedia dates).
- "Unadapted borrowing" is Wiktionary's own technical linguistic classification (a loanword kept in its donor-language form, unlike a naturalized loanword) — not elaborated further on this page.