angst

Meanings

Noun

• Emotional turmoil; painful sadness.
• A feeling of acute but vague anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression, especially philosophical anxiety.

Verb

• To suffer angst; to fret.

Origin

• Borrowed from German Angst or Danish angst; attested since the 19th century in English translations of the works of Freud and Søren Kierkegaard. Initially capitalized (as in German and contemporaneous Danish), the term first began to be written with a lowercase "a" around 1940–44. The German and Danish terms both derive from Middle High German angest, from Old High German angust, from Proto-Germanic *angustiz; Dutch angst is cognate. Compare Swedish ångest.