It was quite surprising to discover that the word angst – a word that perfectly captures both teenage attitudes and my feelings towards philosophy – is actually a relatively new addition to the English language, first appearing in the 1940s (although it had sporadically appeared earlier, always in a foreign context). This is often credited to Søren Kierkegaard, who used it to describe a philosophical dilemma for the first time, particularly his thoughts on moral freedom and religion in his work The Concept of Anxiety (and later expanded by other authors to encompass existential dread). Kierkegaard derived the word from the Dutch term angest, meaning “anxiety”, with angest itself believed to have originated from the Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European roots angustu and angh, both conveying a sense of “painful”.
