angst

Etymology

Borrowed from German Angst or Danish angst; attested since the 19th century in English translations of the works of Freud and Søren Kierkegaard. (George Eliot used the phrase complete with definite article: "die Angst".) Initially capitalized (as in German and contemporaneous Danish), the term first began to be written with a lowercase "a" around 1940–44.^[1][2][3] 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.

Pronunciation

• (Canada, UK, US) IPA^(key): /æŋ(k)st/

• Audio (CA synth)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æŋkst

Noun

angst (uncountable)

1. Emotional turmoil; painful sadness.
   • 1979, Peter Hammill, Mirror images

     I've begun to regret that we'd ever met / Between the dimensions. / It gets such a strain to pretend that the change / Is anything but cheap. / With your infant pique and your angst pretensions / Sometimes you act like such a creep.

   • 2007, Martyn Bone, Perspectives on Barry Hannah (page 3)

     Harry's adolescence is theatrical and gaudy, and many of its key scenes have a lurid and camp quality that is appropriate to the exaggerated mood-shifting and self-dramatizing of teen angst.

2. A feeling of acute but vague anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression, especially philosophical anxiety.

Verb

angst (third-person singular simple present angsts, present participle angsting, simple past and past participle angsted)

1. (informal) To suffer angst; to fret.
   • 2001, Joseph P Natoli, Postmodern Journeys: Film and Culture, 1996-1998

     In the second scene, the camera switches to the father listening, angsting, dying inside, but saying nothing.

   • 2006, Liz Ireland, Three Bedrooms in Chelsea

     She'd never angsted so much about her head as she had in the past twenty-four hours. Why the hell hadn't she just left it alone?

References

• angst on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “angst” in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, →ISBN.
• "angst" in WordNet 2.0, Princeton University, 2003.

Anagrams

• 'ganst, Gnats, Stang, Tangs, Tsang, gnast, gnats, stang, tangs

Etymology

From Middle High German angest, from Old High German angust, from Proto-Germanic *angustiz.

Adjective

angst

1. afraid, anxious, alarmed

Noun

angst c (singular definite angsten, not used in plural form)

1. fear, alarm, apprehension, dread
2. anxiety
3. angst

Etymology

From Old Dutch *angust, from Proto-Germanic *angustiz. Related to Dutch eng (“narrow; scary”). Cognate with German German Angst.

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -ɑŋst

• Audio

  (file)

Noun

angst m (plural angsten, diminutive angstje n)

1. fear, angst, anxiety

Anagrams

• stang

Etymology

From Middle Low German (compare German Angst).

Noun

angst m (definite singular angsten, uncountable)

1. angst

References

“angst” in The Bokmål Dictionary.