Edgy means tense and on the point of snapping, or daringly new. Feeling edgy, an edgy silence, edgy comedy.
The two senses pull apart: an edgy person is nervous and short-tempered, and edgy art is deliberately provocative. The second has been worn thin by marketing, where edgy usually signals something quite safe pretending otherwise.
1adjectiveedgyTense and on the point of snapping.
“He's been edgy all week, waiting to hear whether he got the job.”
2adjectivedaringlyDaringly new or provocative.
“The gallery showed edgy work by young artists that shocked some older visitors.”
edgy is a quality of tension.
Edge plus -y. The nervous sense came first; the fashionable sense arrived in the twentieth century.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂eḱ- — sharp
Proto-Germanic
*agjō
Proto-West Germanic
*aggju
Old English
eċġ
Middle English
egge
English
edge
English, today
edgy
From edge + -y. Compare German eckig (“angular, edgy”). edge comes from Middle English egge, from Old English eċġ, from Proto-West Germanic aggju, from Proto-Germanic agjō, from Proto-Indo-European h₂eḱ- (“sharp”). See also Dutch egge, German Ecke, Danish æg, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish egg; also Welsh hogi (“to sharpen, hone”), Latin aciēs (“sharp”), acus (“needle”), Latvian ašs, ass (“sharp”), Ancient Greek ἀκίς (“needle”), ἀκμή (“point”), and Persian آس (“grinding stone”)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA