Word.ws English Dictionary

hathos

hathos noun: enjoyment derived from hatred of a person or thing.

Noun

hathos (uncountable)

  1. Enjoyment derived from hatred of a person or thing.
    • The patron saint of hathos connoisseurs, H.L. Mencken, was a brave soul, but even a fellow as sturdy and unstinting as he might have been struck dumb in the presence of the extravagantly hathotic Kathie Lee Gifford.1996 January 7, Rod Dreher, “Hate it, Love it”, in Sun-Sentinel

Origin of hathos

Blend of hate + pathos. According to journalist Alex Heard, this word was coined in 1985 when he was searching for a word to describe the "cringe-y feeling you get when celebs go AWOL" and attended a Super Bowl party where he and another guest, then-Bob Dole press aide Scott Richardson, exchanged ideas until they came up with "hathos." The word's first apparent use in print was in an essay by Heard, published in The Washington Post on May 17, 1987.

Questions about hathos

What does hathos mean?
Hathos means enjoyment derived from hatred of a person or thing.
What part of speech is hathos?
Hathos is a noun.

Words near hathos in the dictionary

  1. Hathoric
  2. Hathorn
  3. Hathorne
  4. Hathornes
  5. Hathorns
  6. hathos
  7. Hathras
  8. haths
  9. Hathur
  10. Hathyr
  11. Hati

Source and license

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