These words describe troubled states of mind in which a person feels frustrated and helpless concerning his present situation, or in which he fears that some harmful event will occur in the future. Anxiety , the most general of these words, can relate on one hand to those words here that describe a fearful state of mind concerning the future: anxiety about the outcome of the election. Unlike any of these other words, however, it can refer to a fear of the future per se and not just of a single hazard. This meaning is particularly used by psychiatrists to refer to patients who are immobilized by such a feeling without being able to explain what it is they fear: The boy had been so mistreated that he faced each day with a vast, uncomprehending anxiety .

Anxiety also relates, on the other hand, to words of this group that are not necessarily tied to fear of the future. Existential philosophers developed this meaning to refer to the helpless, all-encompassing frustration of the human condition when confronted with the inexplicability of life. Recently this kind of anxiety is often referred to by the word angst , from the Danish of the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard: In the Age of Anxiety , W.H.Auden claims that our fear of the future is really a fear of ourselves and our own irrepressible.

Dread , apprehension and foreboding emphasize the fear of something that has yet to happen. Dread is the most intense of any of the words listed here, with overtones of helplessness in the face of something as inevitable as it is terrible. The thing dreaded may be a specific occurrence or a less well-defined evil that is none the less terrifying to consider.

• During the international crisis everyone was filled with the dread of nuclear war; She did not know what to expect on the dark road ahead, but every shadow filled her with dread .

The word can, of course, be used hyperbolically for more trivial occasions: I dread the rush-hour traffic so much that I often avoid it by coming late to work. Apprehension is more formal than either dread or anxiety , less intense in feeling, and applies to vaguer fears of a future happening. It is not so much a harmful inevitability that is foreseen as an uncertain outcome that keeps one in suspense: No matter how perfect the weather, she never conquered the apprehension with which she saw him off at the airport. Like anxiety , foreboding is midway between dread and apprehension in it formality, its intensity and its conviction of certain or possible harm. What sets this word aside is its aura of superstition: Because it rained on her wedding day, she spent the rest of the week in gloomy foreboding . The word can be used without this overtone in which case it points to a more general nagging doubt about the future: He carried his report home with a sharp foreboding of the nasty scene he would face that evening.

Worry is far less formal than the previous words and implies an obsessive concern for far more mundane matters. It frequently appears in the plural.

• Forget your worries and relax.

It is often used as an abstraction for a habit of mind that compulsively frets about the future without real result: Worry never makes up for what hard work could have accomplished.

Misgiving is doubt about the outcome of an action, or a feeling of apprehension provoked by such doubt: He had some misgivings about investing in the stock, and when he saw the company’s annual report he knew at once they were justified. Uneasiness and disquiet , unlike misgiving , do not necessarily apply to fear about the future. Both suggest that actual physical discomfort or restlessness accompanies the apprehensive or fearful state, uneasiness most strongly so. Disquiet refers to a more subtle uneasiness over an often ill-defined danger.

• What had at first been merely a faint disquiet as the minutes passed became at last outright uneasiness that set him to pacing about the hospital’s waiting room.

ANYONYMS: assurance, calmness, composure, confidence, ease, equability, equanimity, nonchalance, placidity, quietude, security.