People who take pleasure from causing pain, suffering, or humiliation to others.
From the name of the Marquis de Sade, an 18th-century French writer known for his extreme writings about violence. The word was coined in the 1890s and combined with '-ist' (one who practices something).
The Marquis de Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille, where he wrote some of his most explicit works in secret code on toilet paper—the irony is that this dangerous prisoner's name gave us a word used to diagnose psychological disorders. Psychiatry literally named a condition after a literary villain!
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