Saturday, November 27, 2010

Epicaricacy

Noodling around the Internet yesterday, I found myself playing with the OneLook Reverse Dictionary, which lets you describe a concept, then spits out a list of related words. I entered “taking pleasure in the misfortune of others” knowing full well that, because there’s not a single English word that can handle it, I’d likely end up with the German word schadenfreude.
     So, imagine my surprise when I was presented with a perfectly good English synonym—epicaricacy—I’d never seen before. It was like opening a Rhyming Dictionary and discovering the rhyme for orange.
     Which, by the way, is door hinge.

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