Phobias

– (foh-bee-uhs)

by someone who has one

Phobias are technically used to describe irrational, disabling fear as a mental disorder, and are commonly misused to describe hatred of a particular thing or subject. Everyday language has misused the use of this suffix as a mild or irrational fear with no serious substance; however, its origin is from areas of psychiatry that study serious phobias that disable a person’s life. For more information on the psychiatric side of this, including how psychiatry groups phobias as “agoraphobia”, “social phobia”, or “simple phobia”.

This site provides you with a list of words ending in –phobia, or a list of fears that have been given names. Only a few of the terms occur in medical literature. In many cases, the naming of phobias is a word game.

Most of the terms were devised by adding the suffix -phobia to a Greek word for the object of the fear (some use a combination of a Latin root with the Greek suffix, which some consider linguistically impure).

Some claim that an attempt to create a list of phobias is an irrational endeavor because, theoretically, a person could be conditioned to be afraid of literally anything.