Sadism
noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 The enjoyment of inflicting pain or humiliation without pity. countable, uncountable
- 2 sexual pleasure obtained by inflicting harm (physical or psychological) on others wordnet
- 3 Achievement of sexual gratification by inflicting pain or humiliation on others, or watching pain or humiliation inflicted on others. countable, uncountable
- 4 Deliberate or wanton cruelty, either mental or physical, to other people, or to animals, regardless of whether for (sexual) gratification. broadly, countable, uncountable
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism."
Etymology
From French sadisme and German Sadismus. Named after the Marquis de Sade, famed for his libertine writings depicting the pleasure of inflicting pain to others. The word for "sadism" (sadisme) was coined or acknowledged in the 1834 posthumous reprint of French lexicographer Boiste's Dictionnaire universel de la langue française; it is reused along with "sadist" (sadique) in 1862 by French critic Sainte-Beuve in his commentary of Flaubert's novel Salammbô; it is reused (possibly independently) in 1886 by Austrian psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis which popularized it; it is directly reused in 1905 by Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality which definitively established the word.
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.