List of phobias
The English suffixes
-phobia,
-phobic,
-phobe occur in technical usage in psychiatry to construct words that describe irrational, disabling fear as a mental disorder, in chemistry to describe chemical aversions, in biology to describe organisms that dislike certain conditions, and in medicine to describe hypersensitivity to a stimulus, usually sensory. 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. 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.