{"id":115818,"date":"2026-09-17T10:05:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=115818"},"modified":"2026-09-17T10:05:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:05:20","slug":"what-does-schadenfreude-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/humor\/what-does-schadenfreude-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"What Does Schadenfreude Mean? The Joy You&#8217;re Not Supposed to Feel"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='booster-block booster-read-block'>\n                <div class=\"twp-read-time\">\n                \t<i class=\"booster-icon twp-clock\"><\/i> <span>Read Time:<\/span>9 Minute, 27 Second                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div><p>Someone slips on a wet floor. Nobody is hurt. The coffee goes flying, their arms windmill, and they land with a very undignified little &#8220;oof.&#8221; And somewhere inside you, before you can stop it, a tiny grin appears.<\/p>\n\n<p>That grin has a name, and the name is German. So what does schadenfreude mean? It is the word for the pleasure we feel at someone else&#8217;s bad luck. Huge numbers of people look it up every month, which tells you something all by itself: almost everyone knows the feeling, even if they never learned the word.<\/p>\n\n<p>Here is the funny part. The word is really a joke we tell on ourselves. And one of the oldest warnings about it gives a reason not to gloat that is far stranger than &#8220;it&#8217;s rude.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<h2>What does schadenfreude mean?<\/h2>\n\n<p>Schadenfreude (say it SHAH-den-froy-duh) joins two German words. <em>Schaden<\/em> means harm or damage. <em>Freude<\/em> means joy. Put them together and you get &#8220;harm-joy&#8221;: the happy little flicker you feel when something goes wrong for somebody else.<\/p>\n\n<p>It covers a lot of ground. The laugh at a video of someone walking into a glass door. The quiet satisfaction when the colleague who brags nonstop gets corrected in a meeting. The very loud satisfaction when a rival team loses. Some of it is harmless slapstick. Some of it has teeth.<\/p>\n\n<p>English never made its own everyday word for this. It simply borrowed the German one. The Oxford English Dictionary&#8217;s earliest example of it in English comes from 1852, and the man who wrote it down was not amused. We will come back to him.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Why schadenfreude feels so good<\/h2>\n\n<p>This is where a quirky word turns into something more interesting. Scientists have watched it happen inside the brain.<\/p>\n\n<p>In 2009, a team in Japan led by Hidehiko Takahashi published a study in the journal <em>Science<\/em>. Volunteers read about imaginary people who were doing better than them in areas they cared about. That stirred up envy, and a brain area linked to pain and conflict became more active. Later, the volunteers read that those same envied people had suffered a misfortune. This time a reward area deep in the brain, called the ventral striatum, lit up. And the people whose brains showed the strongest envy response were the ones who showed the strongest reward response when the envied person fell.<\/p>\n\n<p>Put simply: envy hurts, and someone else&#8217;s fall can feel like the painkiller.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is why schadenfreude rarely shows up for strangers we have no feelings about. It shows up for the show-off, the rival, the person who seemed to have it all. If you have ever wondered <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/personal-growth-and-life-skills\/why-am-i-jealous-of-other-peoples-lives\/\">why you feel so jealous of other people&#8217;s lives<\/a>, schadenfreude is the other side of the same coin.<\/p>\n\n<p>People who study this feeling have also found, again and again, that it grows when we think the person had it coming. A stranger slipping on ice gets a wince. A cheat getting caught gets a cheer.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The word one scholar called &#8220;fearful&#8221;<\/h2>\n\n<p>Back to that first English use. It appears in a book of lectures called <em>On the Study of Words<\/em>, by a word scholar named Richard Chenevix Trench. He was not celebrating a handy new term. He was worried by it.<\/p>\n\n<p>He called it &#8220;a fearful thing&#8221; that any language should need a word for the pleasure people feel at the calamities of others, &#8220;for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<p>In other words, a language only bothers to name something people actually do.<\/p>\n\n<p>Trench also pointed out that the ancient Greeks had a word for it. Aristotle used that word in his writing on ethics, where he treated delight in other people&#8217;s misfortune as a flaw of character. He paired it with envy as two sides of one problem. Envy is pain at someone&#8217;s good luck. This is pleasure at their bad luck. The healthy middle, for Aristotle, was simply caring whether people get what is fair.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Is schadenfreude bad?<\/h2>\n\n<p>Mostly, it is human. Laughing when a friend trips over their own shoelaces, and then helping them up, is not a moral crisis. A lot of good comedy runs on exactly that.<\/p>\n\n<p>But the research does come with a warning label. In 2011, psychologists Mina Cikara, Matthew Botvinick and Susan Fiske studied devoted fans of two bitterly rival sports teams. When fans watched their rival fail, the same reward area of the brain lit up. And the fans who felt the most pleasure also said they were more likely to heckle, insult, threaten or even shove a fan of the other team.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is the quiet danger of the little grin. Enjoying someone&#8217;s fall sits only a short step away from wanting to help them fall.<\/p>\n\n<p>It turns up on our phones, too. A whole corner of the internet runs on watching strangers fail, get mocked or get piled on. If you have noticed that you <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/real-life\/why-do-i-feel-worse-after-scrolling\/\">feel worse after scrolling<\/a>, even on days you were laughing, that is worth paying attention to.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What is the opposite of schadenfreude?<\/h2>\n\n<p>You may have seen the word &#8220;freudenfreude,&#8221; meaning joy at someone else&#8217;s joy. It is a lovely idea, but it is a made-up word that German speakers find a bit odd. German already has a real one: <em>Mitfreude<\/em>, which means &#8220;joy-with.&#8221; It is the happiness you feel when a friend gets the job, passes the exam or finally brings the baby home.<\/p>\n\n<p>Notice the difference. Schadenfreude needs someone to lose. Mitfreude only needs someone to win.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The strangest reason not to gloat<\/h2>\n\n<p>Most advice about schadenfreude says: don&#8217;t gloat, it&#8217;s unkind. Fair enough. But one very old warning against it gives a much odder reason.<\/p>\n\n<p>It is an ancient Hebrew proverb, and the heart of it goes like this: don&#8217;t be glad when your enemy stumbles. Then it explains why. Not because gloating makes you look bad. Because God may see your gladness, be displeased by it, and turn the anger away from your enemy.<\/p>\n\n<p>Sit with that for a second, because it flips the whole thing around. The gloating does not settle the score. It might be the very thing that lets the other person off the hook. The moment you start cheering someone&#8217;s downfall, the spotlight moves off their heart and onto yours.<\/p>\n\n<p>And there is something freeing in that. You do not have to be the one keeping score. You never were. Justice and mercy belong to something far bigger than any of us, and nobody has ever been made whole by enjoying another person&#8217;s pain.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What to do with the little grin<\/h2>\n\n<p>You cannot stop the flicker. It arrives before you have had a chance to think. But you can decide what happens next, and none of this costs a thing.<\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Name it.<\/strong> Just thinking &#8220;ah, that&#8217;s schadenfreude&#8221; takes most of the power out of it. It becomes a feeling you are noticing instead of a feeling that is steering.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Follow it back to envy.<\/strong> Ask yourself: what did this person have that I wanted? The answer is usually more useful than the grin.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Help them up.<\/strong> If a friend trips, laugh together and then offer a hand. A moment at their expense becomes a moment you share.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Practise the opposite on purpose.<\/strong> Once a day, notice someone else&#8217;s good news and say something kind about it. Mitfreude gets stronger with use.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Check who you are really rooting against.<\/strong> If there is one person whose failure would feel especially sweet, that is usually an old hurt, not a sense of humour. It might be worth finding out <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/am-i-ready-to-forgive\/\">whether you are ready to forgive them<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>The next time someone skids across a wet floor and you catch that grin rising, don&#8217;t panic. You are not a monster. You are a person, and people have wrestled with this exact flicker for thousands of years. That is why there is a word for it.<\/p>\n\n<p>Laugh if it is funny. Then help them up. And if it is someone you have been quietly waiting to see fall, try putting that down. You were never the one holding the scales, and it turns out there is real relief in letting go of them.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Let&#8217;s talk<\/h2>\n\n<p>Is laughing at a stranger&#8217;s fail video harmless fun, or is it the same feeling as enjoying a rival&#8217;s downfall, just smaller? Where would you draw the line? Tell us what you think in the comments below.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Share this<\/h2>\n\n<p><strong>Post 1:<\/strong> The first time &#8220;schadenfreude&#8221; showed up in English, the scholar who wrote it down called it &#8220;a fearful thing.&#8221; His point: a language only needs a word for something people actually do. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/humor\/what-does-schadenfreude-mean\/<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Post 2:<\/strong> Schadenfreude = harm + joy. The real German opposite isn&#8217;t &#8220;freudenfreude&#8221; (that one&#8217;s made up). It&#8217;s Mitfreude: joy-with. Trying to have a lot more of that one. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/humor\/what-does-schadenfreude-mean\/<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Post 3:<\/strong> I always thought the reason not to gloat was &#8220;it&#8217;s rude.&#8221; Turns out one of the oldest warnings against it says gloating over someone&#8217;s fall might be exactly what gets them off the hook. Never thought about it that way. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/humor\/what-does-schadenfreude-mean\/<\/p>\n\n<h2>Questions people ask about schadenfreude<\/h2>\n\n<h3>What does schadenfreude mean in simple words?<\/h3>\n<p>Schadenfreude means feeling pleasure or satisfaction when something bad happens to someone else. The word is German and joins &#8220;Schaden&#8221; (harm or damage) with &#8220;Freude&#8221; (joy), so it literally means &#8220;harm-joy.&#8221; English speakers borrowed the German word because English has no common single word for the feeling.<\/p>\n\n<h3>How do you pronounce schadenfreude?<\/h3>\n<p>Schadenfreude is pronounced roughly SHAH-den-froy-duh. The &#8220;sch&#8221; sounds like &#8220;sh,&#8221; the &#8220;eu&#8221; sounds like &#8220;oy,&#8221; and the final &#8220;e&#8221; is spoken as a soft &#8220;uh.&#8221; In German the word starts with a capital S because all German nouns are capitalised, but in English it is usually written in lower case.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Is schadenfreude a bad thing?<\/h3>\n<p>Schadenfreude is a normal human emotion, and a quick laugh at harmless slapstick is not usually a problem. It becomes harmful when it turns into enjoying someone&#8217;s real suffering or wanting them to fail. A 2011 brain-imaging study of rival sports fans by Mina Cikara, Matthew Botvinick and Susan Fiske found that fans who felt more pleasure watching a rival team fail also said they were more likely to insult, threaten or shove that team&#8217;s fans.<\/p>\n\n<h3>What is the opposite of schadenfreude?<\/h3>\n<p>The opposite of schadenfreude is taking joy in someone else&#8217;s good fortune. In English this is sometimes called &#8220;freudenfreude,&#8221; but that is a modern invented word rather than real German. The genuine German word for sharing in another person&#8217;s happiness is &#8220;Mitfreude,&#8221; which means &#8220;joy-with.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<h3>Why do people feel schadenfreude?<\/h3>\n<p>People tend to feel schadenfreude most strongly toward someone they envy or someone they believe deserved the misfortune. A 2009 study in the journal Science led by Hidehiko Takahashi found that when an envied person suffered a setback, a reward area of the brain called the ventral striatum became more active, and the people who felt the most envy showed the strongest reward response, suggesting the pain of envy and the pleasure of schadenfreude are closely linked.<\/p>        <div class=\"booster-block booster-reactions-block\">\n            <div class=\"twp-reactions-icons\">\n                \n                <div class=\"twp-reacts-wrap\">\n                    <a react-data=\"be-react-1\" post-id=\"115818\" class=\"be-face-icons un-reacted\" href=\"javascript:void(0)\">\n                        <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/happy.svg\" alt=\"Happy\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">\n                        Happy                    <\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                                                    <span style=\"display: none;\" class=\"twp-react-count\">0<\/span>\n                        \n                                                <span class=\"twp-react-percent\"><span>0<\/span> %<\/span>\n                                            <\/div>\n                <\/div>\n\n                <div class=\"twp-reacts-wrap\">\n                    <a react-data=\"be-react-2\" post-id=\"115818\" class=\"be-face-icons un-reacted\" href=\"javascript:void(0)\">\n                        <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/sad.svg\" alt=\"Sad\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">\n                        Sad                    <\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                                                    <span style=\"display: none;\" class=\"twp-react-count\">0<\/span>\n                                                                        <span class=\"twp-react-percent\"><span>0<\/span> %<\/span>\n                                            <\/div>\n                <\/div>\n\n                <div class=\"twp-reacts-wrap\">\n                    <a react-data=\"be-react-3\" post-id=\"115818\" class=\"be-face-icons un-reacted\" href=\"javascript:void(0)\">\n                        <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/excited.svg\" alt=\"Excited\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">\n                        Excited                    <\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                                                    <span style=\"display: none;\" class=\"twp-react-count\">0<\/span>\n                                                                        <span class=\"twp-react-percent\"><span>0<\/span> %<\/span>\n                                            <\/div>\n                <\/div>\n\n                <div class=\"twp-reacts-wrap\">\n                    <a react-data=\"be-react-6\" post-id=\"115818\" class=\"be-face-icons un-reacted\" href=\"javascript:void(0)\">\n                        <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/sleepy.svg\" alt=\"Sleepy\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">\n                        Sleepy                    <\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                                                    <span style=\"display: none;\" class=\"twp-react-count\">0<\/span>\n                        \n                                                <span class=\"twp-react-percent\"><span>0<\/span> %<\/span>\n                                            <\/div>\n                <\/div>\n\n                <div class=\"twp-reacts-wrap\">\n                    <a react-data=\"be-react-4\" post-id=\"115818\" class=\"be-face-icons un-reacted\" href=\"javascript:void(0)\">\n                        <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/angry.svg\" alt=\"Angry\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">Angry<\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                                                    <span style=\"display: none;\" class=\"twp-react-count\">0<\/span>\n                                                                        <span class=\"twp-react-percent\"><span>0<\/span> %<\/span>\n                        \n                    <\/div>\n                <\/div>\n\n                <div class=\"twp-reacts-wrap\">\n                    <a react-data=\"be-react-5\" post-id=\"115818\" class=\"be-face-icons un-reacted\" href=\"javascript:void(0)\">\n                        <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/surprise.svg\" alt=\"Surprise\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">Surprise<\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                                                    <span style=\"display: none;\" class=\"twp-react-count\">0<\/span>\n                                                                        <span class=\"twp-react-percent\"><span>0<\/span> %<\/span>\n                                            <\/div>\n                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n\n    ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What does schadenfreude mean? The German word for enjoying someone else&#8217;s bad luck, why your brain loves it, and the oddest ancient reason not to gloat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":115816,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[639],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-humor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115818"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115820,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115818\/revisions\/115820"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}