A compound word English never got around to building
German builds new words by fusing existing ones together, and Schadenfreude is one of the clearest examples: Schaden means "harm" or "damage," Freude means "joy," and stacking them gives you, transparently, "harm-joy." Duden, the standard reference dictionary for German, defines it as "boshafte Freude über das Missgeschick, Unglück eines andern" — malicious joy at another person's mishap or misfortune.
English could have built the same compound out of its own materials — "harm-joy" isn't an unreasonable calque — but it never did. Instead, English speakers reached for the ready-made German word once they needed to name the feeling precisely, which is the common path a loanword takes when the borrowing language has the concept but never bothered to name it on its own.
The specific feeling it names
The precision matters: Schadenfreude isn't pleasure at just anything bad happening, and it isn't wanting harm on someone in advance. It's the specific, narrower reaction of enjoying misfortune that has already happened to someone else — a rival sports team blowing a lead, a driver who cut you off getting pulled over two blocks later, a smug prediction aging badly. The emotion is common enough to be near-universal, which is exactly why a one-word label for it was useful enough to travel between languages.
German dictionaries themselves don't fully agree on how much moral judgment to build into the definition. Duden's "boshafte Freude" leans into "malicious," while DWDS defines the same word without that qualifier, as simply pleasure at another's mishap. Psychologists studying the emotion generally treat it the second way: a description of a common reaction, not a verdict on the character of whoever feels it.
How to actually use it in an English sentence
In English, Schadenfreude functions as an uncountable noun, almost always used on its own rather than pluralized or modified heavily: "There was more than a little schadenfreude in the office when the loudest critic's project got cancelled." It keeps its German capitalization in careful writing (German capitalizes all nouns), though English style guides vary and lowercase schadenfreude is common and accepted.
Pronunciation is the other thing that trips up new users: it's roughly SHAH-dən-froy-də, with the "sch" as an English "sh" sound and the final "e" pronounced as a short, weak vowel rather than silent.
It sits in the same category as words like déjà vu and senpai — a foreign phrase English adopted wholesale rather than translate, because nothing native said quite the same thing.
"Schadenfreude" isn't quite the same thing as "gloating"
English does have words that sit near schadenfreude, and it's worth being precise about how they differ. "Gloating" describes openly, visibly expressing triumph over someone else's failure, often when you had some hand in causing it or in besting them directly — it's an action, not just a feeling, and it usually shows. Schadenfreude is the private feeling itself, whether or not you ever act on it or had anything to do with causing the misfortune in the first place: you can feel schadenfreude silently, watching the news, about a stranger's bad luck you had zero part in.
That's the gap German filled and English didn't: English has words for showing triumph (gloating, crowing) but no single native word for the quieter, purely internal version of the same reaction, which is exactly the gap Schadenfreude was borrowed to fill.