anxietas

Anxietās is Latin, from the verb angere, meaning to squeeze, strangle, or choke. The Proto-Indo-European root *h₂enǵʰ- carried the same sense of tightness and constriction. In Latin, anxius meant 'troubled' or 'uneasy,' but the physical metaphor was always present — anxiety was the feeling of being squeezed. Seneca, writing to Lucilius around 65 CE, distinguished anxietas (a chronic disposition to worry) from angor (an acute choking feeling). Both came from the same root. Both named tightness.

The word entered English through Old French angoisse and medieval Latin anxietatem. By the seventeenth century, English had both 'anxiety' and 'anguish' — the first for the mental state, the second for the physical or emotional extremity. But they were the same word, forked. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621 described anxiety as a subspecies of melancholy, a 'perpetual agitation' of the mind. The word was psychological by then, but it still meant squeezing.

Sigmund Freud made anxiety the centerpiece of psychoanalysis. His German word was Angst, a cognate from the same PIE root. In his 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud argued that anxiety was not a symptom of neurosis but its cause — the signal that triggered all defense mechanisms. The English translation used 'anxiety' for Freud's Angst, and the word moved from general unease to a specific psychoanalytic concept.

The DSM-III in 1980 created a category called 'anxiety disorders,' splitting what had been a single concept into generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, phobias, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The proliferation of specific diagnoses made anxiety both more clinical and more common. By 2023, anxiety disorders were the most prevalent mental health conditions globally, affecting an estimated 301 million people. The word the Romans used for a tight chest now names the defining emotional state of the twenty-first century.