Angst

How to spell angst

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce angst

What does angst mean?

1. nounA feeling of deep anxiety, dread, or insecurity, often without a single clear cause.

Angst in a sentence

• The teenager's diary was full of angst about fitting in at school.

• Choosing a career path filled her with angst for months.

Where does angst come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word was taken directly from modern German, where Angst means fear, anxiety, or dread, and it is always capitalised in German as nouns there are. The German word descends from Old High German angust, and behind it lies the same ancient root that gave Latin angere, meaning to choke or to squeeze, and angustus, meaning narrow; the underlying idea is the tight, constricted feeling that worry produces in the chest. English borrowed angst in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely through the translation of writers and thinkers such as Soren Kierkegaard and Sigmund Freud, who used it for a deep, existential unease rather than ordinary nervousness. The same root family connects angst to the everyday English words anxious, anguish, and anger, all of which carry that sense of being pressed or tightened. Because the word entered English already fully formed, English keeps its German spelling, including the unusual run of letters -ngst that catches writers out.

How the word is built

• angst (a single, unanalysable borrowing from German meaning fear or dread); the tricky part is the consonant cluster -ngst, which has no separable suffix