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Long ago (half a century), I had occasion to translate the word "masochism" into Chinese.  At that stage, I wasn't even sure what "masochism" itself meant.  Supposedly it was "the madness of deriving pleasure from pain", I guessed especially sexual pleasure — something like that.

Wanting to give the most accurate possible translation into Chinese, I thought I should begin by investigating the etymology of the word, as is my bent.  So I pulled out my trusty 1960 Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, my lexical vade mecum.  Here's what it had (has — I still keep it on my desk):

[After L. von Sacher-Masoch (1835-1895), Austrian novelist, who described it.]  Med. Abnormal sexual passion characterized by pleasure in being abused by one's associate; hence any pleasure in being abused or dominated.

My recollection is that, at the time, I couldn't readily find an English-Chinese dictionary that had the term "masochism" in it, so I may have made up this rendering for it myself, although I'm not absolutely certain that I did so:

zìnüèdài kuáng 自虐待狂 ("madness of self abuse") (129 ghits)

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that the most common translation of "masochism" in Chinese today is this:

shòunüèkuáng 受虐狂 ("madness of enduring / accepting / receiving abuse") (13,700.000 ghits)

It seems that nobody attempted to render "masochism" in such a way that it would reflect the fact that it derived from a person's surname.

Now, more than half a century later, wanting to see the latest understanding of the term, I looked it up in two current etymological reference works.

Wiktionary:

From German Masochismus, coined alongside Sadismus in 1886 by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his book Psychopathia Sexualis. Named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose novel "Venus in Furs" explores a sadomasochistic relationship, +‎ -ism.

In more detail, Etymonline:

Suppose your name was Plarich and somebody coined the term Plarichism as "deriving pleasure from eating insects" because you actually ate some bugs.  Wouldn't you be upset at having insect-eating named after you?  Wouldn't it be better / more scientific to call it entomophagy?  Mutatis mutandis, ditto for some Latinate version of "the madness of deriving sexual pleasure from pain", rather than "masochism".

I will not attempt to sort out the similarities and differences with sadism, with which masochism is often linked, thus sadomasochism, except to say that, although it looks as though it might have a more conventional etymology ("sad"), sadism too is named after an individual, the French libertine Marquis de Sade (1740–1814).

From French sadisme and German Sadismus. Named after the Marquis de Sade, famed for his libertine writings depicting the pleasure of inflicting pain to others. The word for "sadism" (sadisme) was coined or acknowledged in the 1834 posthumous reprint of French lexicographer Boiste's Dictionnaire universel de la langue française; it is reused along with "sadist" (sadique) in 1862 by French critic Sainte-Beuve in his commentary of Flaubert's novel Salammbô; it is reused (possibly independently) in 1886 by Austrian psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis which popularized it; it is directly reused in 1905 by Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality which definitively established the word.

(Wiktionary)

Incidentally, here's a bit of trivia that may interest some Language Log readers:  "Sacher-Masoch is the great-great-uncle, through her Austrian-born mother Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, of the late English Rock star and film actress Marianne Faithfull. She passed away in January of 2025".  (source)

Selected readings

• • "Usage masochism" (6/25/14)
  • "Annals of redundancy and masochism" (7/17/17)
  • "'Sadomasochism' in Chinese" (7/28/13)
  • "Sinological suffering" (3/31/17)
  • "More comments on comments (just between us)" (1/9/12)

June 28, 2025 @ 5:23 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and medicine, Language and psychology, Lexicon and lexicography

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