"Only the Germans would invent Schadenfreude..."

[elfs]

There is this assumption that there's no word in English to match the German term schadenfruede, "malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of others." This popular notion has been repeated often in the popular press and even shows up in Dictionary.com's "usage" segment.

I'm happy to report that such a popular notion is wrong. Schadenfreude is a late-comer to our shores. The correct English term is epicaricacy, and it means exactly the same thing.

Comments

Just my two cent (that's EUR not USD)

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting, epicaricacy seems to be an almost unknown word. Even the really big Langenscheidt dictionary doesn't know of it, but I found a reference at leo.org (IMHO the best dictionary around.) http://dict.leo.org/?p=/37m..&search=epicaricacy

Regards,

Niki (german native)

Re: Just my two cent (that's EUR not USD)

[(Anonymous)]

Strangely, I've arrived at a conversation about looking for "epicaricacy" by looking for it myself...

As long as we're recommending online dictionaries, my favourite is a meta-dictionary search engine called "onelook" (http://www.onelook.com). And inevitably, 99% of what I search for there shows up in the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) my favourite open-source encyclopedia.

Cheers,
Simon