Freudenfreude

What it means

Your phone lights up: a friend has passed the licensing exam you failed four weeks ago. For a second your stomach drops. Then you call her, and by the end of the call you are grinning on her behalf. English speakers have started calling that Freudenfreude, pleasure in another person’s good fortune. This is not a German word. It appears in no German dictionary and German speakers do not use it.

As a feeling it is real enough. The 2022 New York Times piece that spread the word describes the bliss of seeing someone else succeed even when it does nothing for you, and quotes the psychologist Catherine Chambliss calling it social glue. The feeling needs no rivalry, though it is most noticeable when there was one. It ends when the other person’s success starts to cost you something.

German does have a word for it: die Mitfreude. Duden defines it as taking part in another person’s joy. The verb is sich mitfreuen, to be glad with someone.

Where it comes from

The form copies Schadenfreude, damage-joy, and swaps the first half for Freude, joy, keeping the linking n. English Wiktionary labels it a pseudo-Germanism built on that model. Duden has no entry for it; its page for the word returns not found. DWDS says the word is not in its contemporary lexical sources and offers only a machine-generated grammar for it.

The word was built by English speakers. The earliest use we found is the title of a 1978 paper by Lee E. Preston, “Schadenfreude and freudenfreude”, in the Journal of Behavioral Economics. Brené Brown used it in Atlas of the Heart in 2021. The jump to wide use came on 25 November 2022, when Juli Fraga’s New York Times article called it a term social scientists use. Slate collected the German response two weeks later: commenters said they had never heard it, and a translator said the doubled Freude sounded like toddler talk.

How to use it

Watching my sister open the acceptance letter, I had a rush of freudenfreude I did not expect. Casual English, in the self-help register the word arrived in.

Freudenfreude is not German; a German would say Mitfreude, or just “ich freue mich für dich”. Corrective English, the register of language columns and comment threads.

What it is not

Schadenfreude. Duden defines Schadenfreude as malicious joy at another person’s misfortune. Freudenfreude points the other way, at their success, and it is English. Schadenfreude is easiest toward a rival; Freudenfreude is easiest toward a friend. One is a real German compound; the other is a mirror image made in English.

Mitfreude. The German word names the same feeling and has a Duden entry, rated one bar out of five for frequency. The difference is provenance, not meaning. Slate’s 2022 piece gave Mitfreude and the verb sich mitfreuen as the real German, and noted that the doubled form sounds close to Freudenhaus, a brothel.

In the wild

• Lee E. Preston, “Schadenfreude and freudenfreude”, Journal of Behavioral Economics, vol. 7, 1978.
• Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart, Random House, 2021: Wiktionary quotes her calling freudenfreude the enjoyment of another’s success and a subset of empathy.
• Juli Fraga, “The Opposite of Schadenfreude Is Freudenfreude. Here’s How to Cultivate It”, The New York Times, 25 November 2022.