Word for taking pain in another’s pleasure is ‘gluckschmerz,’ or is it?

There are few words in any language as fun to say as schadenfreude.

Its etymology is easy to understand. Schadenfreude, the pleasure in someone else’s pain, comes from the German words for those exact emotions.

But people can also take pain in someone else’s pleasure. Why isn’t there a word for that?

It turns out there is. Scholars have finally found a linguistic relative of schadenfreude, and it sounds like another German portmanteau: gluckschmerz.

Except it isn’t.

“It’s not an actual word in the German language,” says University of Kentucky psychologist Richard Smith. “You won’t find it in any German dictionary.”

Or, for that matter, any English dictionary. Dr. Smith, who is believed to be the first to use gluckschmerz in the title of a published academic paper, discovered the word on the Internet and it stuck with him. When he included it in a 2012 research presentation, though, he was tsk-tsked by German peers almost immediately.

“I started looking into it,” he said. “Where did it come from?”

Some words are born of new technology and human behavior. Selfie, for example, was the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of 2013. Vape won the award in 2014.

Others, like schadenfreude, cross continents in mysterious ways. It is an old German word whose usage in English dates to the 1850s, spiking in American publications after World War II but then fading, according to Google data. It returned nearly a half-century later, some linguists say, because of a 1991 episode of “The Simpsons.” More.

See: The Wall Street Journal

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