A German neologism coined in English
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English speakers have taken to the German term schadenfreude like fish in water, but it seems that they're embarrassed at using a word that signifies taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune. Consequently, they invented the word freudenfreude, the positive feeling of joy or delight in another person's success or happiness.
Freudenfreude is apparently a recent coinage, stemming from a December, 2022 New York Times article by Juli Fraga. I haven't heard it in the wild yet, but I will start to use it, natürlich.
Yay, freudenfreude!
Selected reading
- "Schadenfreudeful" (4/20/19)
- "German lexicographic richness" (10/11/21)
Condign Harbinger said,
November 26, 2025 @ 10:10 am
A companion for Scheißenfreude?
Victor Mair said,
November 26, 2025 @ 10:20 am
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schei%C3%9Fenfreude
Francois lang said,
November 26, 2025 @ 10:39 am
What a charming and heartwarming neologism, especially in this era of such turmoil.
Heidi Renteria said,
November 26, 2025 @ 1:11 pm
For millennia, a key concept in Buddhism has been mudita, a Pali and Sanskrit term often translated as "sympathetic joy." It means finding joy in the joy of others, that is, freudenfreud.
Victor Mair said,
November 26, 2025 @ 3:18 pm
@ Heidi Renteria
Beautiful, just beautiful!
Julian said,
November 26, 2025 @ 6:08 pm
Very good. But why stop there? I propose:
Parkenfreude: You're cruising a crowded shopping mall carpark when someone pulls out of a space just ahead of you.
Schlangefreude: You get to the supermarket checkout just ahead of someone with a really full trolley.
Platzenfreude: In the coffee shop you get your favourite spot in the back corner, the position which gives the best view and offers most protection from predators (lions, cheetahs etc)
Fruhlingsfreude: It's a fine spring day and the daffodils are out.
Hundballfreude: You're sitting in the park with time on your hands watching someone throw a ball to their dog.
tsts said,
November 26, 2025 @ 8:49 pm
A wonderful new word. But grammatically, it should be Freudefreude to match up with Schadenfreude, since Schaden is actually singular.
Other words I have been trying to popularize are Schadenfreudeschaden, the additional misery experienced by seeing that someone else delights in their misery, and Schadenfreudeschadenfreude, which is the additional delight derived in turn from the Schadenfreudeschaden.
It typically more of less converges in a couple of iterations due to the dampening factor lambda 3 or 4.
Thorsten Sander said,
November 27, 2025 @ 3:45 am
@tsts
If 'Freudenfreude' were a German word, it would be actually correct. The additional 'n' functions here as an interfix (Fugenlaut).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfix
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugenlaut
Yerushalmi said,
November 27, 2025 @ 4:10 am
The Yiddish/Hebrew word "firgun" means much the same thing, and it's also in the English dictionary.
Lukas Daniel Klausner said,
November 27, 2025 @ 10:33 am
As a native German speaker, it's a bit grating; but what annoys me more is that “confelicity” existed already and is a perfectly fine word. ^^;
x said,
November 27, 2025 @ 12:20 pm
The term used in a nice song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huWfQdG2_ws
katarina said,
November 27, 2025 @ 12:34 pm
Julian reminds us that life is sprinkled with unexpected dashes of happiness.
Re. Freudenfreude, the mark of a true friend. It's been said that a true friend is not just a friend who sympathizes with you in your failures but a friend who is happy in your successes.
Reampft said,
November 27, 2025 @ 12:56 pm
@Yerushalmiv And the German word with the same meaning is "(ver)gönnen". If I am happy about somebody's good fortune 'Ich gönne dir das.' is a perfectly good way to express that feeling.
tsts said,
November 27, 2025 @ 4:56 pm
@Thorsten Sander: yes, you are right of course. Did not think of that. (I am a native German speaker.)
David Marjanović said,
November 27, 2025 @ 9:23 pm
As Thorsten Sander said, German compound nouns aren't simple chains of nominative singular forms. Rather, special prefix forms are used, which may or may not be identical to the nom. sg.; the prefix form of Freude is in fact Freuden-. Likewise Schlangen-, but Platz-, and usually but not always Hunde-…
Historically, prefix forms were originally identical to the genitive plural, but after a few centuries of analogical developments and changes in declension patterns that is not true across the board anymore.
Julian said,
November 27, 2025 @ 11:27 pm
@David m
Thanks for that. My German is probably about IELTS 2, and I was making it up as I went along, in homage to "alles lookenpeepers" https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/blinkenlights.html
However I did feel that 'Fruhlingsfreude' somehow sounds better than 'Fruhlingfreude'. Would that be right?
Yves Rehbein said,
November 27, 2025 @ 11:29 pm
@Thorsten Sander, the definition of a Fugenlaut is like that it is nonfunctional, is it not?
@ Tsts, thanks for the prompt. Yes, Schaden seems to be singular. The translation for the neologism is singular ("… success or happiness"). Freuden is plural in any case (“joy”). Existing compounds show all combinations, -den-, -de-, -d- for no obvious reason. As a test, I am thinking preposition in command of dative "zu Freuden des …", though in Freudenfest it could be adjective. The parallel example of zugunsten / zu Gunsten experts seem to agree is ambiguous. Incidentally, Gunst has no plural, @ tsts. It has no Fugenlaut since it is not part of a compound, @Thorsten Sander. It is related to gönnen and Yiddish firgun, @Yerushalmi.
Philip Taylor said,
November 28, 2025 @ 7:03 am
My German (such as it is) has been acquired solely through osmosis, but would not "Fruhlingsfreude" actually be "Frühlingsfruede", Julian ?
Julian said,
November 28, 2025 @ 8:19 am
In this sort of informal context I don't bother trying to find out how type the umlaut.
Scott Rhodes said,
November 28, 2025 @ 2:00 pm
FWIW, I have a citation for a use of the word slightly preceding the December 2022 date given above. Every Friday, the website electoral-vote.com includes a "This Week in Schadenfreude" and "This Week in Freudenfreude" story. The first column under the name "This Week in Freudenfreude" appeared on 2022 August 12 at https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2022/Senate/Maps/Aug12.html — the site accepted suggestions from readers for the name of that weekly entry, and according to the story apparently over thirty people suggested "This Week in Freudenfreude".
wgj said,
November 29, 2025 @ 4:35 am
I also know the word from electoral-vote.com. And given how popular that website is among politics nerds, I'd bet the author of that NYT article learned and adopted it from there too.
Victor Mair said,
November 29, 2025 @ 10:01 am
Please read Scott Rhodes' careful, explicit comment.
David Marjanović said,
December 2, 2025 @ 8:03 pm
In about 2/3 of the cases there are phonological functions, like turning the preceding component into a trochee or marking its end if it isn't; the latter function is shared with a bunch of excrescent consonants that appeared out of nowhere around the same time – Axt "ax", Saft "juice, sap", eigentlich "actually" < eigen + -lich, jemand "some-/anybody" < je + Mann…
The rest is partly historical (some nouns have several different frozen prefix forms, e.g. Kind-, Kindes-, Kinder-), partly due to random analogical developments, and there are many cases that are confusing to native speakers, plus geographic variation.
In any case, Frühlings-, with [ŋs].
Yes; plural Schäden. But I can't guarantee that's how it worked 500 years ago.
For such cases the German convention is to use ue (likewise ae, oe for ä, ö), because too often that changes the meaning.
Schaden "damage"
Schäden "damages"
Vogel "bird"
Vögel "birds"
schwul "gay" (male only)
schwül "humid & hot, stuffy" (of weather; almost never metaphorical)
drucken "print"*
drücken "press"
* A loan from southern dialects where it means "press" generally, due to the historical process of umlaut that operated in drücken farther north being blocked by following velar consonants in the south.