anxiety
/aŋˈzʌɪəti
/noun (plural anxieties) [mass noun]
1A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome: he felt a surge of anxiety [count noun]: anxieties about the moral decline of today’s youth...
- Our worries and anxieties evaporated in an instant, and within half an hour my wife, Jayne, was asking how we could buy one.
- The worries and anxieties of his years at Vétheuil seemed a distant memory.
- He appears to have resolved these anxieties by stressing the moral gulf between his characters and his own beliefs.
Synonyms
worry, concern, apprehension, apprehensiveness, consternation, uneasiness, unease, fearfulness, fear, disquiet, disquietude, perturbation, fretfulness, agitation, angst, nervousness, nerves, edginess, tension, tenseness, stress, misgiving, trepidation, foreboding, suspense
informal butterflies (in one's stomach), the willies, the heebie-jeebies, the jitters, the shakes, the jumps, the yips, collywobbles, jitteriness, jim-jams, twitchiness
British informal the (screaming) abdabs
Australian rhyming slang Joe Blakes
North American archaic worriment
1.1 Psychiatry A nervous disorder marked by excessive uneasiness and apprehension, typically with compulsive behaviour or panic attacks: [as modifier]: she suffered from anxiety attacks...
- They do not seem to know that depression and anxiety can cause eating disorders.
- As you learn to modify your compulsive behaviour, your anxiety levels should lessen.
- However, the fact that she suffers from anxiety and panic attacks is less certain of being admitted.
2 [with infinitive] Strong desire or concern to do something or for something to happen: the housekeeper’s eager anxiety to please...
- Achievements since are the result of an anxiety to play it safe.
- The only cementing force was greed and the anxiety to cling on to power.
- Madame des Ursins confesses in her voluminous correspondence that she made herself a burden to the king in her anxiety to exclude him from all other influence.
Synonyms
eagerness, keenness, desire, impatience, longing, yearning
Origin
Early 16th century: from French anxiété or Latin anxietas, from anxius (see anxious).
angina from mid 16th century:
The Latin word angere, ‘to choke, squeeze, or strangle’, is the source of a number of English words. The most obvious is perhaps angina, which originally meant quinsy (an inflammation of the throat) and later referred to angina pectoris, a heart condition characterized by a feeling of suffocation and severe pain. Nervous tension can produce feelings of tightness in the throat and chest, which explains why angere is indirectly the root of anguish (Middle English) and anxiety (early 16th century).