Meaning
A feeling of deep anxiety, dread, or inner turmoil, especially when vague, existential, or adolescent. In casual English it often means plain worry or emotional drama, which is much narrower than the German original, whose everyday meaning is simply 'fear'. The register runs from pop-psychological to jokey, and the word now thrives more in ordinary speech than in philosophy. Ranges from serious existential dread to ironic teenage or workplace drama; frequently tongue-in-cheek in casual use. Regional use: General English (borrowed from German).
Origin
German Angst 'fear, anxiety' descends from Old High German angust, from the same ancient root that gave English anger, anguish, and anxious and Latin angere 'to strangle' - an underlying sense of painful tightness or constriction. George Eliot used the German word in English writing as early as 1849, and Merriam-Webster dates first known use to 1872, but it remained essentially a foreign word for decades. Translations of Freud's psychology familiarised it, as did existentialist philosophy - Kierkegaard wrote a book about the concept of anxiety (Begrebet Angest), and Heidegger made Angst central to his analysis of human existence - yet the Online Etymology Dictionary treats it as naturalised English only from 1944.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- angsty
Usage Examples
- The novel's narrator is a teenager dripping with angst about exams and first love.
- Losing the account caused the management no end of angst that quarter.
- His stand-up routine mines the quiet angst of middle-aged suburban life.