Word.ws English Dictionary

epicaricacy

/ˌɛpɪˈkæɹɪkəsi/

epicaricacy noun: rejoicing at or deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of others.

Noun

epicaricacy (uncountable)

  1. (rare) Rejoicing at or deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of others.
    Synonyms:
    schadenfreude

Synonyms of epicaricacy

Forms of epicaricacy

alternative formepicharicacy

Origin of epicaricacy

From Ancient Greek ἐπιχαιρεκακία (epikhairekakía, “joy upon evil”). The word appears in most of the editions of Nathaniel Bailey's dictionary and many dictionaries that came after. Linguist Joseph T. Shipley included it in his Dictionary of Early English (1963), citing Bailey. Evidence of actual usage seems scant until it was picked up by various "interesting word" websites around the turn of the twenty-first century.

Questions about epicaricacy

What does epicaricacy mean?
Epicaricacy means rejoicing at or deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of others.
What part of speech is epicaricacy?
Epicaricacy is a noun.
How do you pronounce epicaricacy?
Epicaricacy is pronounced /ˌɛpɪˈkæɹɪkəsi/.

Words near epicaricacy in the dictionary

  1. epicardiocytes
  2. epicarditis
  3. epicardium
  4. epicardiums
  5. epicarial
  6. epicaricacy
  7. epicaridean
  8. epicarideans
  9. epicaridium
  10. epicarp
  11. epicarpal

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: epicaricacy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-epicaricacy.wav.

Cite this entry: “epicaricacy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/epicaricacy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.