Crisis

Like the English “crisis,” the Danish word Krise derives from the Greek κρίσις. Originally a medical term, by the twentieth century it came to be used mostly outside of medicine. Its lexical meaning in Danish is a testing or trial and can carry with it the sense of a critique. It can also refer to a decisive moment or event, after which a situation will forever be changed, for example, the crisis when a patient’s fever will either break in the next twenty-four hours or the patient will die. Although Danish used the spelling Krise and Crise interchangeably, the form with a “k” used in modern Danish was rare before the beginning of the nineteenth century.1 Additionally, neither form appears in the 1833 edition of Molbech’s Dansk Ordbog, a copy of which Kierkegaard owned and whose author he respected as an authority on the Danish language.2