Dread
Etymology
From Old English "ondrǣdan," “to fear, dread,” built on a rare prefix plus "rǣdan" (to counsel, advise). The word carries a sense of forewarning — dread is fear that has read the situation ahead of time. It is anticipation gone dark.
noun · /DRED/
A heavy, anticipatory fear of something bad that is coming.
What it names
Reach for it when the feeling is oriented toward a future event you can see approaching and cannot stop.
Example
A quiet dread settled over the office in the week before the layoffs were announced.
Related idea
Where fear is a reaction to a present danger and anxiety is objectless, dread sits between them: it has an object (the thing that’s coming) but the object hasn’t arrived. In existentialism, dread (Kierkegaard’s Angst) becomes the vertigo of confronting one’s own freedom.