angst

CEFRC1

/ˈæŋ(k)st/

noun · verb

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

  1. 01

    noun

    A strong feeling of worry, fear, or sadness.

  2. 02

    noun

    Extra detail

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

Examples

  • Angst is the fear of our own incapacity for peace.

  • Teenage angst is a part of life.

At a glance

Sits at C1 on the CEFR scale

Senses
5
Parts of speech
2
Citations
5

Also pronounced

  • /ˈeɪ̯ŋ(k)st/

Deep Dive

noun

Extra meanings

  1. Fiction focusing on characters experiencing strong emotions and conflicts with other characters.

  2. Emotional turmoil; painful sadness; anguish.

verb

Extra meaning

  1. To suffer angst; to fret.

More examples

In context

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • General: a story with a general theme. It is neither romance or angst but may incorporate elements of all other genres.

Quick test

Two questions on this entry. Nothing is scored.

Question 1 · Quick check

Teenagers often experience blank about their uncertain future and identity.

Practise this properly in the app, where the word comes back before you forget it.

Nearby

Origin

noun

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.