Zeitgeist
Etymology
A German compound of Zeit, "time," and Geist, "spirit," literally "the spirit of the time." It emerged in German Romantic and idealist philosophy around 1800, associated especially with Hegel’s view of history as the unfolding of a spirit through successive ages. English borrowed it in the nineteenth century, and it now serves as everyday shorthand for whatever ideas and moods happen to be in the air.
noun · /TSYTE-gyste/
The defining spirit, mood, or set of assumptions of a particular period, as expressed in its culture and thought.
What it names
The invisible shared atmosphere of an era — the concerns and sensibilities that make a decade feel like itself and later look dated.
Example
The show captured the zeitgeist so precisely that watching it a decade later feels like opening a time capsule of the era’s anxieties.
Related idea
A trend is a specific, trackable movement in taste or behavior; the zeitgeist is the deeper, ambient spirit of an age that many such trends express at once.