angst

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   Emotional 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 / Sometimes you act like such a creep.

2. 2
   noun

   Fiction 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.

3. 3
   verb

   To suffer angst; to fret.

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

4. 4
   noun

   an acute but unspecific feeling of anxiety

5. 5
   noun

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

Etymology

Borrowed 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.