List of phobias

Contents

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 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.

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.

Animal phobias

Non-psychological conditions

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

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

Miscellaneous

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. ^ M.T. Haslam (1964). The treatment of an obsessional patient by reciprocal inhibition. 2. pp. 213–216. doi:10.1016/0005-7967(64)90018-X. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/000579676490018X. Retrieved 28 September 2011. 
  4. ^ The encyclopedia of phobias, fears, and anxieties. 2001. http://books.google.com/books?id=E2imSyZZDh0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=^+The+encyclopedia+of+phobias,+fears,+and+anxieties&hl=en&src=bmrr&ei=rEd2TsaOD4KriAeb2-2jDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=ombrophobia&f=false. 
  5. ^ The Computer Contradictionary by Stan Kelly-Bootle, "Aibohphobia", p. 7
  6. ^ {{cite news|url=http://sports.uniontrib.com/uniontrib/20060610/news_1mi10jenkins.htmltitle=I hate to burst Poway Unified's balloon|date=2006-06-10|work=The San Diego Union-Tribune}}
  7. ^ http://comics.com/peanuts/1982-05-19
  8. ^ 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
  9. ^ Ben Farmer (10 January 2008). "Phobia catalogue reveals bizarre list of fears". Telegraph.co.uk. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1575157/Phobia-catalogue-reveals-bizarre-list-of-fears.html. "A catalogue of unusual phobias reveals that the fear of long words is known as hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia." 
  10. ^ 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.