Is there a synonym for "schadenfreude" that sounds more colloquial?

Question

Is there a more colloquial synonym for "schadenfreude"? I'm specifically looking for a noun that denotes a pleasure derived from other people's misfortunes or sufferings. Sadly, I couldn't find any nouns derived from 'to gloat'.

What I have in mind is a plain English word derived from Middle English, Anglo-Norman, Old English, Dutch or Old French. It must be none of the following:

1. Informal contemporary term (e.g. "lulz")
2. Loan-word that sounds ostensibly alien (e.g. "schadenfreude", "epicaricacy")
3. An item of the professional jargon (e.g. some psychological condition)

I'm looking for something plain and simple like 'eviljoy'* (a word that I've just made up).

This word must fit the variable in the sentence "It is common for Jane to feel/experience x ". A word is deemed to fit x on the basis of 'common-sense' linguistic intuition in addition to being a singular noun + the above-stated conditions.

To elaborate on the intuition bit, 'sadism', for instance, is not applicable, neither is gloating. For, if we input the former, then we have "It is common for Jane to feel sadism'. This obviously doesn't sound right, and 'sadistic' would be appropriate, were I not looking for a noun. If the latter is used, then "It is common for Jane to feel gloating" also sounds pretty awkward.

Answer 1

Since the essential quality of schadenfreude is passive enjoyment from a safe distance of the suffering or misfortune of others, I think that the most apt way to express the idea in English might be with the phrase armchair malice.

The underlying notion of armchair here is similar to its sense in the established U.S. English phrase armchair quarterback, which, according to Dictionary.com, refers to

a person who offers advice or an opinion on something in which they have no expertise or involvement

Armchair malice likewise comes from a position of (relative) ease, away from the fray, and with no sense of responsibility for the debacle that unfolds before one's unsympathetic yet delighted eyes.

As for the word malice itself, a usage note in Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003) makes this point:

MALICE implies a deep-seated often unexplainable desire to see another suffer.

Put armchair and malice together, and you get something roughly equivalent to the cold-blooded, essentially voyeuristic pleasure of schadenfreude.

Answer 2

No, there is no such word.

The word 'Schadenfreude' was borrowed from the German where it means the joy felt at someone else's misfortune. It first appeared in German in the 16th c, not as some ancient word from the Proto-Germanic homeland, but (most probably) from the usual German strategy of deliberately mushing words together.

There is nothing stopping English from having a word for a complex concept, witness 'jealousy' and 'envy', very common but complex ideas. But there's also no guarantee.

There's a term (not a single word) for the lack of a term in a language. That is called a lexical gap which means an expectation of a word but it doesn't exist. For example, there's a gender neutral term for 'brother' or 'sister' which is 'sibling', but there's no gender neutral word for 'uncle' and 'aunt'. And in comparison with other languages, say Mandarin, English has numerous gaps for other kinship terms like older vs younger brother or sister, or mother's vs father's brother or sister.

But for 'schadenfreude' I wouldn't say this lack is much of a gap. All the languages that have a word for it either use that exact word or make a loan translation of 'schaden' (harm) and 'freude' (joy). And those languages are all 'large' languages (many speakers with a long complicated cultural history with large educated vocabularies. That is to say that the gap is filled in these other languages from the German neologism.

To say there is no such word is maybe a bit over-confident. A negative is hard to prove. A positive is much easier; you just take a suggested word and check. For a negative you have to check all words. I haven't done that. I could rely on my own internal feeling that there is nothing like that word based on having nothing immediately come to mind (trusting my years long native experience with English) and meta-reasoning that if there were a word already there'd be no reason to borrow) but those are not particularly trustworthy by others and not really transferable.

What is verifiable though is that one can check the suggestions made by on-line dictionaries and thesauruses. For the word 'Schadenfreude' they give many synonyms for joy, but none anywhere near the sweet and sour complexity of joy at someone else's misfortune.

Answer 3

Though not as definitive as schadenfreude, I like "smug" for your example in that a person feeling schadenfreude also feels smug in knowing that the hurt party got what they deserved or that they (the one feeling schadenfreude) feels they could have predicted whatever it was that befell the hurt party.

Answer 4

Try the word "gloat" which is defined as:

to dwell on one's own success or another's misfortune with smugness or malignant pleasure: 'his enemies gloated over his death'.

[Oxford Online Dictionary]

Answer 5

'epicaricacist'?

Not in the OED but in reasonably common usage.