Noun

The state or quality of being serious.

*, chapter=16

, title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=“[…] She takes the whole thing with desperate seriousness . But the others are all easy and jovial—thinking about the good fare that is soon to be eaten, about the hired fly, about anything.”}}

*{{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham), title=(The China Governess)

, chapter=18 citation , passage=‘Then the father has a great fight with his terrible conscience,’ said Munday with granite seriousness . ‘Should he make a row with the police […]? Or should he say nothing about it and condone brutality for fear of appearing in the newspapers?}}

* July 18 2012 , Scott Tobias, AV Club The Dark Knight Rises [http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-dark-knight-rises-review-batman,82624/]

Though Bane’s sing-song voice gives his pronouncements a funny lilt, he doesn’t have any of the Joker’s deranged wit, and Nolan isn’t interested in undercutting his seriousness for the sake of a breezier entertainment.

Noun

(-)

Emotional turmoil; painful sadness.

* 1979 , Peter Hammill, Mirror images

I've begun to regret that we'd ever met / Between the dimensions. / It gets such a strain to pretend that the change / Is anything but cheap. / With your infant pique and your angst pretensions / Sometimes you act like such a creep.

* 2007 , Martyn Bone, Perspectives on Barry Hannah (page 3)

Harry's adolescence is theatrical and gaudy, and many of its key scenes have a lurid and camp quality that is appropriate to the exaggerated mood-shifting and self-dramatizing of teen angst .

A feeling of acute but vague anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression, especially philosophical anxiety.