Glückschmerz

What it means

At the holiday party the manager calls up the colleague who took long lunches all year and hands him the bonus envelope. Everyone claps. You clap too, and something in your chest goes sour. English lists call that Glückschmerz: pain at someone else’s good luck. This is not a German word. It appears in no German dictionary and German speakers do not use it.

Psychologists who study it treat it as the mirror of Schadenfreude. A 2018 review by Richard H. Smith and Wilco van Dijk gives three conditions that produce it: you already dislike the person, the good fortune looks undeserved, or their gain is your loss, as in a competition. A friend’s promotion rarely qualifies; a rival’s does.

In English the word is usually printed without the umlaut, as gluckschmerz. Commenters on the linguistics blog Language Hat pointed out in 2015 that in German “gluck” without the umlaut suggests a hen clucking, and that Glückschmerz would most naturally mean the pain of good luck, not pain at someone else’s.

Where it comes from

The parts are real German: Glück, luck or happiness, and Schmerz, pain. The compound is not. Duden has no entry; its page for the word returns not found. DWDS says the word is not in its contemporary lexical sources and has too few corpus hits to measure. German Wiktionary has no page for it.

It was built by English speakers. English Wikipedia says it was coined as a joke in 1985 by Wanda Tinasky, the pseudonym behind comic letters sent to two Mendocino County newspapers between 1983 and 1988, and adds that correct German would be Glücksschmerz, with a linking s. We could not confirm the 1985 letter itself. In 2015 a Wall Street Journal column by Ben Cohen, as reported by Language Hat, quoted the psychologist Richard H. Smith of the University of Kentucky: it is not a German word and is in no German dictionary. Smith used it anyway, in research papers listed below.

How to use it

I know it is pure gluckschmerz, but I could not watch him unwrap the new car. Casual English, umlaut dropped, as the word usually appears.

Participants reported more gluckschmerz when the rival team’s star player returned from injury. Academic English, the register in which the word now has its steadiest use.

What it is not

Schadenfreude. Duden defines Schadenfreude as malicious joy at another person’s misfortune. It is real German and points at a fall. Glückschmerz points at a rise, and it is English. The two often come from the same source: a 2015 paper by Smith and colleagues found that how strongly people identified with their own group predicted both feelings toward a rival group: pleasure at its losses, pain at its wins.

Envy. Envy wants what the other person has. Glückschmerz can arrive without any wish for the thing itself. You may not want the bonus; you want the coworker not to have it.

In the wild

• Charles E. Hoogland, Richard H. Smith and colleagues, “The joy of pain and the pain of joy: In-group identification predicts schadenfreude and gluckschmerz following rival groups’ fortunes”, Motivation and Emotion, online 2014, print 2015.
• Richard H. Smith and Wilco W. van Dijk, “Schadenfreude and Gluckschmerz”, Emotion Review, vol. 10, 2018: a review of why people feel both socially improper emotions.
• Ben Cohen, The Wall Street Journal, 2015, discussed on Language Hat on 13 June 2015: a column on the word, quoting Smith that it is not German.