means a state of anxious, pleasurable uncertainty about what will happen next, especially when an outcome is deliberately delayed.

from From Latin suspendere, "to hang up" — sus- (up) plus pendere (to hang), the same root that gives us pendulum and pending. The idea is literal: to be in suspense is to dangle, left hanging mid-air with nothing yet decided. It reached English through Old French suspens, and the sense of "hanging in unresolved tension" was there from the start.