You’re on your way to work. There’s this jerk who’s weaving in and out of stop-and-go traffic in bursts of 50 mph. Cutting people off, riding people’s bumpers, even splitting the lane to get mere feet ahead of everyone else. They race up behind you and nearly rear-end you, then speed off up the shoulder. Five minutes and one mile down the road, you see flashing lights: the jerk’s been pulled over for reckless driving. That broad smile on your face as you pass the scene is a result of schadenfreude.

A popular lookup on our site, schadenfreude is a noun that refers to the joy you might feel at another person’s pain. It’s a compound of the German noun Schaden, which means “damage,” and freude, which means “joy.” We know that the word was in use in the mid-1700s in Germany, where it appears in a few books with tales intended for children. It was popular in Germany: discussed by Schopenhauer, Kant, and Nietzsche, as well as used by Goethe, schadenfreude shows up in psychology books, literature for children, and critical theory for over 100 years before it appears in English. Why the late adoption into English? Early citations for the word in English indicate that schadenfreude was thought to be a shameful defect first of Germans, and then of humanity in general. In short, the feeling was unworthy, and therefore so was the word.

Schadenfreude was favored mostly among English-speaking academics until the early 1990s, when it was introduced to more general audiences by The Simpsons. In an episode that aired in October, 1991, Lisa explains what schadenfreude is to Homer, who is gloating at his neighbor’s failure. “Boy,” he marvels, “those Germans have a word for everything.” After that episode aired, we saw a steady increase in the written use of schadenfreude in English.