Etymologically
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angst

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Pronunciation

  • US: /ˈeɪŋ(k)st/[1]

Etymology

It is borrowed from German Angst (“fear, anxiety”),[2][3][4][5][6] from angest,[3][2] from Old High German angust, recorded from the 8th century.[2][5][4] Merriam-Webster takes the English word from Danish angst as well as from German, the Danish word itself being from German.[7][8] The Old High German noun goes back to Proto-Germanic *angustiz, with cognates in Old Frisian ongost (“fear”), Middle Low German angest and Middle Dutch anxt, now angst.[9][2][5][7] It is a suffixed form of the Germanic base of the adjective "narrow, distressed": engi, Old English enge, Old Saxon engi and Gothic 𐌰𐌲𐌲𐍅𐌿𐍃 (aggwus, “narrow”).[2][5][7] Etymonline traces it to Proto-Indo-European *anghosti-, a suffixed form of *angh- (“tight, painfully constricted, painful”),[5] and Orel compares the Slavic word for narrowness and Latin angustus (“narrow”).[9] Barnhart names angō (“to choke, distress”) and the same Latin adjective as cognates, and relates it to anger and anguish.[4] Old English had a related noun angsumnes (“anxiety”), which died out.[5]

Earliest recorded meaning

A feeling of anxiety, dread or unease: the revised OED's first record is from 1902, in the American Journal of Insanity.[2] George Eliot had used the German word in a letter of 1849,[4][5] the date the OED gave in 1989;[10] Merriam-Webster dates the noun to 1887,[7] and Dictionary.com to 1840–50.[11]

Semantic evolution

Etymonline describes the English word as taken from a specialized use of the German noun in psychology, for neurotic fear, anxiety, guilt and remorse.[5] According to Barnhart, it spread slowly in English, given prominence by the translations of Freud read in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, and only after the Second World War did writers such as C. P. Snow use it without italics or quotation marks, in Homecomings (1956); Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1944) still capitalized it as in German.[4] Etymonline likewise says it was treated as a foreign word until the 1940s.[5] Compounds such as angst-ridden are recorded from 1944.[10] In existentialist philosophy it names the dread caused by knowing that one's future is not fixed but must be freely chosen.[12] The verb, to agonize or fret, usually about or over something, is recorded from 1988 in Merriam-Webster;[7] the OED's first record is from 1989, in the Washington Post.[2]

Timeline

  • 1849 – used as a German word in a letter of George Eliot.[4][5][10]
  • 1902 – a feeling of anxiety, dread or unease.[2] Merriam-Webster dates the noun to 1887, Etymonline to 1944 and Barnhart to 1956.[7][5][4]
  • 1944 – compounds such as angst-ridden.[10]
  • 1988 – verb, to agonize or fret.[7] The OED's first record is from 1989.[2]

Meanings

Noun

  1. A strong but vague feeling of anxiety, dread or unease: Her diary was full of adolescent angst about exams.[12][7][2]
  2. In existentialist philosophy, the dread felt by a person who knows that the future is not fixed but must be freely chosen.[12]

Verb

  1. To agonize or fret, usually about or over something: He spent the evening angsting over the wording of one email.[2][7]

References

  1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
  3. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  4. ^ a b c d e f g Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
  6. ^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
  8. ^ Gove, Philip Babcock, ed. (1961), Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam
  9. ^ a b Orel, Vladimir (2003), A Handbook of Germanic Etymology, Leiden / Boston: Brill
  10. ^ a b c d Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
  11. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
  12. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins