The Meaning Of The Word Harmoy

My word is “harmoy”. Noun, enjoyment from other people’s troubles or failures. An example of a sentence would be, “He gained great harmoy when he learned that his ex-girlfriend had been fired from her job.”

When I read that our word inventions could be English versions of untranslatable words, I immediately thought of the German word “schadenfreude”. I had only heard this word a few times before, but I knew there was no word in the English language which accurately conveys the complex meaning. Then there was the task of “naming” this new word, and for that, I decided to create a sound from the literal meaning of the word in German. The literal meaning of this famous word is “harm-joy”, so I thought I would combine the two words to make “harmoy”. Interestingly enough, most native english speakers only know less than two percent of the language, so I quickly confirmed that harmoy wasn’t already a word with a completely

There weren’t really any other words that I rejected, because I was immediately sold on the idea of using the untranslatable word schadenfreude, and the choice was only what to call the new word. My top three choices for the word were harmoy, jarm, or harjoy. While all three of these words sound very weird, I chose harmoy because I thought it sounded the most reasonable out of the three. Having to create simply one word makes me appreciate Shakespeare’s 1,700+ words a lot more. I think he must have have had a very clear image of what he wanted to write in his mind in order to choose to make up his own words instead of use existing ones. The amount of creativity and individuality Shakespeare had is astonishing. What I find even more amazing is how natural his words have become nowadays. Words like dishearten, inaudible, and even eyeball have become part of everyday speech