Apprehension

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /æp.ɹɪˈhɛn.ʃən/

Definitions

1. A feeling of anxiety or fear that something bad or unpleasant may happen
2. An arrest or capture of a person, alongside an emotional state of uneasiness and foreboding about what may occur
3. A state of nervousness or worry about something that might happen ; the process of taking someone into custody by authority

Etymology: The most surprising thing about "apprehension" is that its two senses, anxious dread and the act of grasping with the mind, sit side by side in the same word and come from the same physical idea: taking hold of something. The Latin "apprehensio" was built from "ad-" (toward) and "prehendere" (to seize), so its original sense was literal seizing or catching, and it was later extended to mean grasping an idea with the understanding. Only later did the sense of seizing with fear, of a mind taking hold of a worrying prospect, come to dominate the English word. English borrowed the noun directly from Latin, and it is closely related to the French "appréhension," which carried the same double range of meanings. Because the English verb "apprehend" shares this Latin root, the noun was shaped by the same mental act of laying hold of something, whether that was a fact, a meaning, or a threat. The worry sense is the one most readers meet today, while the mental-understanding sense survives mainly in more formal writing.

Synonyms: anxiety, concern, fear, dread

Antonyms: confidence, calmness