Worried unease, typically about some misfortune one sees coming.
Worried unease, typically about some misfortune one sees coming — and, in medical use, a swamping, often unattached apprehension that shows up in the body.
The most tormented and most diffuse of the everyday members: it foregrounds an anguished uncertainty or dread of misfortune or failure, and can hang loose without an object where worry fastens to a particular problem. Alone in the group, it carries a clinical, diagnostic register (“anxiety disorder,” “anxiety attack”). Plainer and broader than existential angst; without the specific premonition of dread or foreboding; less acute and more drawn-out than fear, fright, or panic.
1520s, from Latin anxietas “anguish, solicitude,” from anxius “uneasy, troubled,” from angere “to choke, squeeze,” from PIE *angh- “tight, painfully constricted” — the same constriction image as anger and anguish.
The family's best-documented clinical shift: treated as a pathological condition by the 1660s, with modern psychiatric use dating to 1904; “Age of Anxiety” comes from Auden's 1947 poem. The very recent surge in mental-health and social-media discourse is plausible but not documented in the sources consulted.