German for ordinary fear, elevated to existential dread by Kierkegaard and Heidegger — from PIE 'tight, narrow.'
A feeling of deep anxiety, dread, or apprehension, especially about the human condition or the state of the world; existential anguish.
From German 'Angst' (fear, anxiety, dread), from Old High German 'angust,' from Proto-Germanic *angustiz (narrowness, tightness, distress), from PIE *h₂enǵʰ- (tight, narrow, painful). The same root produced Latin 'angustus' (narrow), 'anxius' (anxious), and 'angere' (to choke). English borrowed the word through the philosophical writings of Kierkegaard (Danish 'angst') and
Kierkegaard's 1844 work 'Begrebet Angest' (The Concept of Anxiety) used Danish 'angest' to describe the dizziness of freedom — the vertigo humans feel when confronting infinite possibility. Heidegger later adopted the German cognate 'Angst' as a central term in 'Being and Time' (1927), distinguishing it from 'Furcht' (fear of a specific thing). Angst, for Heidegger, has no object — it is anxiety before existence itself.