/æŋ(k)st/
OriginBorrowed from German Angst or Danish angst; attested since the 19th century in English translations of the works of 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.
- uncountableEmotional turmoil; painful sadness; anguish.
“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 / Some”
“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.”
- uncountableA feeling of acute but vague anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression, especially philosophical anxiety.
- uncountableFiction focusing on characters experiencing strong emotions and conflicts with other characters.
“General: a story with a general theme. It is neither romance or angst but may incorporate elements of all other genres.”
“Fans prefer fluff to other types of fic. But angst (dramatic stories where characters have a wide range of emotions, including ... angsty ones) comes in a close second.”
“There are plots that take off from the discovery of another characters' letters or diaries (e.g., CarolB's “First Attachment," an angst fanfic in which Marianne Dashwood discovers Colonel Brandon's di”
- informal, intransitiveTo suffer angst; to fret.
“In the second scene, the camera switches to the father listening, angsting, dying inside, but saying nothing.”
“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?”
Formsangsts(present, singular, third-person) · angsting(participle, present) · angsted(participle, past) · angsted(past)