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List of phobias

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This article is about the suffix -phobia. For the class of psychological disorders, see Phobia.

The English suffixes -phobia, -phobic, -phobe (of Greek origin: φόβος/φοβία ) occur in technical usage in psychiatry to construct words that describe irrational, disabling fear as a mental disorder (e.g. agoraphobia), in chemistry to describe chemical aversions (e.g. hydrophobic), in biology to describe organisms that dislike certain conditions (e.g. acidophobia), and in medicine to describe hypersensitivity to a stimulus, usually sensory (e.g. photophobia). In common usage they also form words that describe dislike or hatred of a particular thing or subject. The suffix is antonymic to -phil-.

For more information on the psychiatric side, including how psychiatry groups phobias such as agoraphobia, social phobia, or simple phobia, see phobia. The following lists include words ending in -phobia, and include fears that have acquired names. In some cases, the naming of phobias has become a word game, of notable example being a 1998 humorous article published by BBC News.[1] In some cases a word ending in -phobia may have an antonym with the suffix -phil-, e.g. Germanophobe / [Germanophile].

A large number of -phobia lists circulate on the Internet, with words collected from indiscriminate sources, often copying each other. Also, a number of psychiatric websites exist that at the first glance cover a huge number of phobias, but in fact use a standard text to fit any phobia and reuse it for all unusual phobias by merely changing the name. Sometimes it leads to bizarre results, such as suggestions to cure "prostitute phobia".[2] Such practice is known as content spamming and is used to attract search engines.[original research?]

Psychological conditions

In many cases specialists prefer to avoid the suffix -phobia and use more descriptive terms, see, e.g. personality disorders, anxiety disorders, avoidant personality disorder, love-shyness.

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

W

X

  • Xanthophobia – fear of the colour yellow
  • Xenophobia – fear of strangers, foreigners, or aliens
  • Xylophobia, Hylophobia, Ylophobia – fear of trees, forests or wood

Animal phobias

Main articles: Animal phobia and Zoophobia

Non-psychological conditions

  • Photophobia – hypersensitivity to light causing aversion to light
  • Phonophobia – hypersensitivity to sound causing aversion to sounds.
  • Osmophobia – hypersensitivity to smells causing aversion to odors.

Biology, chemistry

Biologists use a number of -phobia/-phobic terms to describe predispositions by plants and animals against certain conditions. For antonyms, see here.

Prejudices and discrimination

See also: List of anti-ethnic terms

The suffix -phobia is used to coin terms that denote a particular anti-ethnic or anti-demographic sentiment, such as Americanophobia, Europhobia, Francophobia, Hispanophobia, and Indophobia. Often a synonym with the prefix "anti-" already exists (e.g. Polonophobia vs. anti-Polonism). Anti-religious sentiments are expressed in terms such as Christianophobia and Islamophobia. Sometimes the terms themselves could even be considered racist, as with "Negrophobia."

Other prejudices include:

Jocular and fictional phobias

  • Aibohphobia – a joke term for the fear of palindromes, which is a palindrome itself. The term is a piece of computer humor entered into the 1981 The Devil's DP Dictionary[6]
  • Anachrophobia – fear of temporal displacement, from a Doctor Who novel by Jonathan Morris.[7]
  • Anatidaephobia – the fictional fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you. From Gary Larson's The Far Side.
  • Anoraknophobia – a portmanteau of "anorak" and "arachnophobia". Used in the Wallace and Gromit comic book Anoraknophobia. Also the title of an album by Marillion.
  • Arachibutyrophobia – fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth. The word is used by Charles M. Schulz in a 1982 installment of his "Peanuts" comic strip[8] and by Peter O'Donnell in his 1985 Modesty Blaise adventure novel Dead Man's Handle.[9]
  • Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia – fear of long words.[10] Hippopoto – "big" due to its allusion to the Greek-derived word hippopotamus (though this is derived as hippo- "horse" compounded with potam-os "river", so originally meaning "river horse"; according to the Oxford English, "hippopotamine" has been construed as large since 1847, so this coinage is reasonable); -monstr- is from Latin words meaning "monstrous", -o- is a noun-compounding vowel; -sesquipedali- comes from "sesquipedalian" meaning a long word (literally "a foot and a half long" in Latin), -o- is a noun-compounding vowel, and -phobia means "fear". Note: This was mentioned on the first episode of Brainiac Series Five as one of Tickle's Teasers.
  • Keanuphobia – fear of Keanu Reeves, portrayed in the Dean Koontz book, False Memory, where a woman has an irrational fear of Keanu Reeves and has to see her psychiatrist, Mark Ahriman, each week, unaware that she only has the fear in the first place because the psychotic Ahriman implanted it via hypnotic suggestion to amuse himself. He calls her the "Keanuphobe" in his head.
  • Luposlipaphobia – fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor, also from Gary Larson's The Far Side.
  • Monkeyphobia – fear of monkeys, as named by Lord Monkey Fist in the animated series Kim Possible. Due to spending a summer in a cabin with a crazy chimp mascot, Ron Stoppable has a fear of monkeys, which he gets over several times, usually during battles with Monkey Fist, who is essentially Ron's arch-nemesis.
  • Nihilophobia – fear of nothingness (comes from the combination of the Latin word nihil which means nothing, none, and the suffix -phobia), as described by the Doctor in the Star Trek: Voyager episode Night. Voyager's morale officer and chef Neelix suffers from this condition, having panic attacks while the ship was traversing a dark expanse of space known as the Void. It is also the title of a 2008 album by Neuronium. Also, the animated version of George of the Jungle (2007 TV series) is seen suffering in one episode of the cartoon, where they are telling scary stories.
  • Robophobia – Irrational fear of robots and/or androids, also known as "Grimwade's Syndrome". First heard in the Doctor Who story The Robots of Death.
  • Semaphobia – fear of average Web developers to use Semantic Web technologies.[11]
  • Venustraphobia – fear of beautiful women, according to a 1998 humorous article published by BBC News.[1] The word is a portmanteau of "Venus trap" and "phobia". Venustraphobia is the title of a 2006 album by Casbah Club.

Miscellaneous

See also

References

  1. ^ a b The A- Z of Fear, an October 30, 1998 BBC News unsigned article in the "Entertainment" section
  2. ^ Content Spammers Help You Overcome Prostitute Phobia
  3. ^ Fear of earthquakes
  4. ^ M.T. Haslam (1964). "The treatment of an obsessional patient by reciprocal inhibition". 2 (2–4): 213–216. doi:10.1016/0005-7967(64)90018-X. Retrieved 28 September 2011. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ^ The encyclopedia of phobias, fears, and anxieties. 2001.
  6. ^ The Computer Contradictionary by Stan Kelly-Bootle, "Aibohphobia", p. 7
  7. ^ "I hate to burst Poway Unified's balloon". The San Diego Union-Tribune. 2006-06-10.[dead link]
  8. ^ http://comics.com/peanuts/1982-05-19
  9. ^ The word appears in Chapter 10 when Modesty Blaise and her companion Willie Garvin play a word game in which Garvin challenges Blaise to decipher the meaning of words
  10. ^ Ben Farmer (10 January 2008). "Phobia catalogue reveals bizarre list of fears". Telegraph.co.uk. A catalogue of unusual phobias reveals that the fear of long words is known as hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.
  11. ^ A Semantic Description Language for RESTful Data Services to Combat Semaphobia, M. Lanthaler and C. Gütl in Proceedings of the 2011 5th IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (DEST), 2011, pp. 47–53.
  • Chris Aldrich (2002-12-02). The Aldrich Dictionary of Phobias and Other Word Families. Trafford Publishing. pp. 224–236. ISBN 1-55369-886-X.
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