LEXICAL PROFILE OF SCHADENFREUDE

“Schadenfreude” is a loanword borrowed from German to the English vocabulary used to express
experience of joy that comes from witnessing the troubles or failures of a person. In other words, it’s the
malicious joy in the misfortunes of others.

The structure of this word is very simple: schaden in German refers to harm or damage, and freude refers to
SCHADEN + FREUDE pleasure or happiness, and when united they form the actual meaning of the word (harm + pleasure).
harm joy
damage happiness The spelling of “schadenfreude” does not differ between German and English, but the pronunciation varies
because of the different phonologic features between the two languages, even though they share some
English: /ˈʃɑːdənfrɔɪdə/ patterns. (English /ˈʃɑːdənfrɔɪdə/ and German [ˈʃaːdn̩ˌfʁɔʏ̯də]).
German: [ˈʃaːdn̩ˌfʁɔʏ̯də]

SYNONYMS ANTONYMS ORIGIN

Apart from “schadenfreude”,
there are other words considered
as synonyms that express the
same emotion:
• “Epicaricacy” from Greek
origin
• The slang expression “lulz”,
used when a person plays a
sick joke to someone on the
internet (see Urban
Dictionary)
FREQUENCY
Regarding antonyms, there
is no word form to express
“the joy derived from the
joy of others”.
Anyways, there are
expressions that can refer
to this meaning, such as
“sincere joy”, “pure
pleasure” or “honest joy”.
If we look for “schadenfreude” on Google Ngram, we can notice that the
loanword appeared in the English language in the mid-nineteenth century and
its use endured until our days, even though, according to the OED, the use of
this word is not frequent in today’s English vocabulary.

COLLOCATES
As we use corpora, it is easy to determine that “schadenfreude” is classified as a noun that can
be found in both subject and object positions within a sentence.
Due to the BNC’s lack of examples of “schadenfreude”, we are going to analyze the type of
collocations found in the other corpora:

Regarding EnglishWeb 2013, most of It seems like

The frequency registered in the three corpora used the modifiers of “schadenfreude” have “schadenfreude” can be
(BNC, EnglishWeb 2013 and English Broadsheet a positive connotation, compounding used in an informal
Newspapers 1993-2013) changes from one to this word with adjectives like “gleeful”, context where the
another: 17 hits (0.12 per million) in BNC, 4,079 hits “sweet” or “delicious”. This fact can objective of the word is to
(0.18 per million) in EnglishWeb 2013 and 556 hits signify that this German expression can represent revenge and in
(0.72 per million) in English Broadsheet Newspapers. signify a type of “personal revenge”. As a formal context where
This shows how this word is more commonly written an object, that connotation slightly this expression is used as
on-line and in newspapers rather than in written changes as the most frequent verb a negative emotion.
books. used is “forgive” (as if it was something
negative).

SCHADENFREUDE IN MEDIA Within the English Broadsheet Newspapers, the

Even though this word is not commonly used
nowadays, “schadenfreude” has been used in one
of the famous series of cartoons on television:
The Simpsons.
It appeared in the third episode of the third
season, where one of the protagonist (Homer
Simpsons) experienced pleasure because of the
misfortune of his neighbor (Flanders), and
thereupon, his daughter (Lisa Simpson) would
explain to him that the feeling he had was
“schadenfreude”. However, this emotion is
represented throughout the whole series when a
particular kid laughs when others fail.
collocates of “schadenfreude” acquire a more
formal meaning as the word is not intended to be
expressed as a revenge, but as a result of social
circumstances, for instance “mass”, “historical” or
“little”.
The verbs used when “schadenfreude” is an
object reflect the negative meaning of the word as
we can see in the verbs “forgive”, “suppress” or
“conceal”. Anyways, there are verbs like “feel” or
“enjoy” that imply the pleasure of a misfortune.
REFERENCES
OED. (2017). Accessed from http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/172271?redirectedFrom=schadenfreude#eid
Urban Dictionary. (2017). Accessed from https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lulz
English Broadsheet Newspapers. (2017). Accessed from
https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/corpus/first_form?corpname=preloaded/sibolport13_tt21;align
English Web 2013. (2017). Accessed from
https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/corpus/first_form?corpname=preloaded/ententen13_tt2_1;align
BNC corpus. (2017). Accessed from
https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/corpus/first_form?corpname=preloaded/bnc2_tt21;align
Google Ngram Viewer. (2017). Accessed from
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=schadenfreude&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=15&s
moothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cschadenfreude%3B%2Cc0