Mean-spirited ill will or malice.
Mean-spirited ill will or malice — the urge to wound, vex, or frustrate another, frequently at a price to oneself.
The odd one out: not hot anger at all but a malicious disposition to hurt or annoy, often pettily and at one's own expense (“cut off your nose to spite your face”). Belongs to the malice cluster, not the anger cluster — cold and calculated where anger, rage, and fury are hot and impulsive, and reaching outward into harassing action where resentment and bitterness stay inward. Pettier and smaller in scale than grand malice or malevolence; rooted in envy and resentment.
c. 1300, “contempt, insolent disdain,” a clipped form of despite, from Old French despit, from Latin despectus “a looking down on, scorn,” from despicere “to look down on” (de- “down” + specere “to look”). So spite is etymologically “a looking-down-on.”
The earliest sense (c. 1300) was “contempt, insolent disdain”; the now-dominant sense of malicious, grudging ill will developed alongside it. The phrase “in spite of” weakened from literal “in defiance/contempt of” to “notwithstanding.” No reliable recent-generation shift is sourced.