- 1惶恐、忐忑不安（對即將發生的事）。書面語，日常說話多半用「緊張」。中文的「忐忑」抓得最準：心上心下、事情還沒發生。
Trepidation is the nervous, slightly afraid feeling you get before something you have to do — a job interview, a first date, telling your parents bad news. It is fear mixed with worry, and the thing you fear has not happened yet. It is always about the future, even the very near future: you feel trepidation as you walk to the door, not after you have walked through it.
The word is formal and a bit literary. In real speech people say 'I was nervous' or 'I was scared'; you meet trepidation in books, news writing, and careful speech. Because it sounds formal, English speakers often use it with a small smile, for something not really dangerous — 'I opened the electricity bill with some trepidation.' That gentle joking use is very common, maybe more common now than the serious one.
It is almost always used with 'with': with trepidation, with some trepidation, with a certain trepidation, with considerable trepidation. It is uncountable, so no 'a trepidation' and no 'trepidations' in normal writing. The old Latin sense was — and that body picture is still there. Trepidation is the feeling that would make your hands shake a little, not a calm thought about risk.
組成From Latin trepidātiō, from the verb trepidō, 'to tremble, to be agitated'. The core image is a body trembling — the fear you can feel physically.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
trepidationnoun/ˌtɹɛp.ɪˈdeɪ.ʃən/
- 1
Anxiety over the uncertain future or possible ill-occurrence.
- I decided, with considerable trepidation, to let him drive my car without me.
- She reached it soon after half-past two. She found its gloomy nineteenth-century façade, black with the smuts of ninety years, a little daunting, and mounted its broad steps in some trepidation. But she rang the bell hard and knocked firmly.
- 2
An involuntary trembling, sometimes an effect of paralysis, but usually caused by terror or fear.
- 3
obsoleteastronomynatural-sciencesA libration of the starry sphere in the Ptolemaic system; a motion ascribed to the firmament, to account for certain small changes in the position of the ecliptic and of the stars.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。