You feel it when a noise startles you awake at night. It may also be there when you walk into a dank basement, accidently travel through a rundown neighborhood, have a disturbing dream, or interact with someone who seems a little sketchy or untrustworthy.

This feeling is difficult to describe. Some may call this being on edge or uneasy. Others may say, “That gave me the creeps!”

Yet there is an exact word to describe this state of being: disquietude (pronounced dis-kwahy-i-tood).

Vocabulary.com defines the word as “a vague unpleasant emotion that is experienced in anticipation of some (usually ill-defined) misfortune.”

Many famous authors have used the word to express their characters’ feelings:

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: “The disquietude of his air, the somewhat apprehensive impatience of his manner, surprised me: but I proceeded.”
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: “Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation.”
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he recalled and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and himself had sketched for their departure.”
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson: “I might have fallen without a struggle for my life had not a sudden disquietude seized upon me and made me turn my head.”

Next time you hear a loud noise in the middle of the night, you will know the exact word that expresses how you feel!