Angst
noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 Emotional turmoil; painful sadness; anguish. uncountable
"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 an acute but unspecific feeling of anxiety; usually reserved for philosophical anxiety about the world or about personal freedom wordnet
- 3 A feeling of acute but vague anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression, especially philosophical anxiety. uncountable
- 4 Fiction focusing on characters experiencing strong emotions and conflicts with other characters. uncountable
"General: a story with a general theme. It is neither romance or angst but may incorporate elements of all other genres."
- 1 To suffer angst; to fret. informal, intransitive
"In the second scene, the camera switches to the father listening, angsting, dying inside, but saying nothing."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Angst is the fear of our own incapacity for peace."
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.
Related phrases
More for "angst"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.