Atiganda is the sixth nityayoga, and its name means great danger or a serious obstacle. It is one of the inauspicious yogas, indeed among the more strongly cautioned against in the panchanga, held unfavourable for beginning important undertakings, journeys, or ceremonies. Reckoned like the others from the summed longitude of Sun and Moon divided into twenty-seven parts, it takes its turn as the lights separate through the month. In selecting an auspicious muhurta an astrologer avoids the malefic yogas, and Atiganda is one that the tradition marks for particular avoidance. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, which fixes the favourable or unfavourable character of each of the twenty-seven yogas; the astronomical basis is only the combined motion of Sun and Moon.
Atiganda combines the intensifying prefix ati, exceeding or beyond, with ganda, itself the name of the tenth nityayoga and meaning a knot or an obstacle, so that Atiganda's own name literally signals an obstacle beyond the ordinary Ganda, a great or excessive impediment rather than merely a knot to be worked loose. This kind of intensified pairing, one yoga's name built from another's with an added qualifier, is not repeated elsewhere among the twenty-seven, which otherwise draw on twenty-seven largely independent words rather than on a smaller root vocabulary combined and recombined, making the Ganda-Atiganda pair a linguistic outlier within the set worth noting on its own account.