It's the word of the day for March 4th.
Today's word is Schadenfreude, spelled S-C-H-A-D-E-N-F-R-E-U-D-E.
Schadenfreude is a noun.
It refers to a feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Massachusetts.
In 1995,
Sox fans were overjoyed to see the Yankees get knocked out of the playoffs in a thrilling divisional series.
It was Boston Schadenfreude, to be sure.
Ever a popular lookup on our site,
the word Schadenfreude refers to the joy you might feel at another person's pain.
It's a compound of the German nouns Schaden, meaning damage, and Freude, meaning joy.
Schadenfreude was a favored subject in Germany by the time it was introduced to English in the mid 1800s.
Discussed by the likes of Schopenhauer, Kant, and Nietzsche,
Schadenfreude was showing up in psychology books, literature for children, and critical theory.
In English, the word was used mostly by academics until the early 1990s,
when it was introduced to more general audiences via pop culture.
In a 1991 episode of The Simpsons, for example,
Lisa explains Schadenfreude to Homer, who is gloating at his neighbor's failure.
She also tells him that the opposite of Schadenfreude is sour grapes.
Boy, he marvels, those Germans have a word for everything.