disquietude
Americannoun
noun
Etymology
Origin of disquietude
Explanation
Sometimes, maybe for no reason at all, you might become agitated with a feeling of restless agitation. This feeling is a sense of disquietude, an edgy feeling that something in your universe is out of order. If you break down the word disquietude you come to its root word, quiet, which means still or noiseless. The dis- prefix means "not," giving it the opposite meaning, and the ending -tude makes it a state of being. So the word literally means "state of being unquiet." For example, it was said in the Washington Post that the 19th-20th-century artist Edward Hopper's paintings present a picture of the disquietude, or uneasiness, of American life.
Vocabulary lists containing disquietude
Into the Wild
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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
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Bless Me, Ultima
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The outrageous comedy of "Joan Is Awful" blunts whatever disquietude we may feel about the episode.
From Salon ● Jun. 17, 2023
The group’s songs, all dance grooves, pulsing bass lines and ’80s-tinged synths, have typically reeked of disquietude and served as a maze into Healy’s brilliant but occasionally self-indulgent mind.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 21, 2022
But in times when I feel swells of disquietude, I don’t try to suppress them.
From New York Times ● Oct. 5, 2021
The front-runner for Best Play is probably Stephen Karam’s bleak and revelatory drama “The Humans,” which has much to say, albeit indirectly, about the disquietude driving this election season.
From The New Yorker ● May 3, 2016
The disquietude he felt on Katahdin’s granite heights inspired some of his most powerful writing and profoundly colored the way he thought thereafter about the earth in its coarse, undomesticated state.
From "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
