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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
sadism
noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
Sadism may stem from a desire to dominate.
▪ He looked grim as he recalled the sadism of the prison guards.
▪ Mzukwa grew quiet as he recalled the brutality and sadism of the prison guards.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But sadism, as we have noticed, in intensifying awareness also distorts it.
▪ Compared to his adulthood of sadism, cruelty and murder, his childhood of abuse and rejection looks benign.
▪ Not a matter of sadism but rather convenience, as there were neither contingencies nor facilities for prisoners here.
▪ There is a streak of sadism in his performance which leads us to expect an answering streak of masochism in Katherine.
▪ This scene was criticised for its accusation of sadism by the Viet Cong in a form which was unsupported by any evidence.
▪ This would make the link between sadism and masochism more clear.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
sadism

"love of cruelty," 1888, from French sadisme, from the name of Count Donatien A.F. de Sade (1740-1815). Not a marquis, though usually now called one, he was notorious for cruel sexual practices he described in his novels.

Wiktionary
sadism

n. 1 (context chiefly psychiatry English) the enjoyment of inflicting pain without pity 2 achievement of sexual gratification by inflicting pain on others 3 gaining sexual excitement and satisfaction by watching pain inflicted by others on their victims 4 a morbid form of enjoyment achieved by acting cruelly to another, or others 5 (''in general use'') Deliberate cruelty, either mental or physical; also refers to cruelty inflicted upon animals, regardless of gratification

WordNet
sadism

n. sexual pleasure obtained by inflicting harm (physical or psychological) on others

Wikipedia
Sadism

Sadism may refer to:

  • Sadomasochism, consenting partners willingly engaging in aspects of pain or humiliation for sexual pleasure. Also, BDSM.
  • Sadistic personality disorder, obsolete term proposed for individuals who derive pleasure from the suffering of others. Also Antisocial personality disorder.
  • Sexual sadism disorder, medical/psychological condition for sexual arousal from inflicting pain/humiliation on unwilling, non-consenting victims.

Usage examples of "sadism".

It had finally been swept aside by the forces of an increasingly nervous secular state empowered by a sickened populace, but its name lingered as a byword for terror, sadism and savagery, and all that is foul in human nature.

Eddie, still racing Hooper down the stretch for the alleged Black Crow, was delighted to find Freud so tight into anal sadism, and developed a facial tic.

Nellie, Dostoevsky brings this type of moral-psychological conflict, with its characteristic swing from wounded sensibility to masochistic self-laceration and sadism, into its sharpest focus.

Stock countered with his own diagnosis: borderline personality disorder, homosexual pedophilia, and sexual sadism that led him to inflict pain on others in order to sexually gratify himself.

Fetishism, infantilism, transvestism, sadism, exhibitionism, and frotteurism are among the more than forty recognized paraphilias.

She felt angry and sick that such things could go on at all, and that such people could become such monstrous practitioners of murder, sadism, masochism, sexual excess, and even beastiality.

Surely there is a measure of sadism involved, particularly on the part of the presiding magistrate and his torturer assistants, but for the common folk, the powerless paupers cheering in the audience, I believe their joy stems from three sources.

He recognises ‘conformist aggression’ - aggression under orders - but feels that human destructiveness is better explained by what he calls ‘malignant aggression’ - that is, by sadism.

Fools tended to get bitten in the posterior by unruly canines: anal sadism to gratify the spectators.

Then when this was objected to by the village men, he emasculated them in a gory bout of sadism.

For no thinking doctor or psychiatrist possessed of this information would touch another electrode for electric shock therapy or even glance at a scalpel or ice pick to perform an operation on the pre-frontal lobes of the brain unless that doctor or psychiatrist is himself so thoroughly aberrated that the act springs, not from any desire to heal, but from the most utter and craven17 sadism to which engrams can bring a man.

But he went too far—just that touch of fuckwit sadism that's sealed his fate.

They had me on a mattress on the floor, a gang bang with minor sadism.

And now, crowning horror of that unutterably horrible orgy of Sadism resublimed, from the eyes of each one of the monstrous audience there leaped out visible beams of force.

As per my request, the librarian had found materials on sexual sadism and the Stockholm syndrome.