The method
How a phobia gets its label
Arachnophobia has hundreds of studies behind it and a place in both diagnostic manuals. Zemmiphobia, the fear of the great mole rat, has six words in one encyclopedia and a handful of quotations that all use it as a joke. Every phobia list online prints the two in the same typeface, in the same flat list, with the same implied authority.
PHOBIASpec separates them. Every one of the 284 entries carries a label saying what the record behind the word actually holds, and the entry says how it got there.
What each label means
One per entry, describing the record rather than the fear. A label is a claim about documents, so it can be checked and it can be wrong.
- Recognised
- 31
Named in DSM-5-TR or ICD-11.
- Studied
- 66
Real clinical literature under this name.
- Documented
- 115
Case reports or historical record only.
- Coined
- 72
In dictionaries and lists, no clinical literature.
Coined does not mean nobody has the fear. It means nobody has published a case, measured a prevalence, or written the term into a manual. Recognised does not mean common, and studied does not mean settled: several of those literatures spend most of their length arguing about what the word covers.
How an entry is written
The sources for a term are gathered and saved before anything is drafted, and the entry is then written from that material and nothing else. A fact that is not in it is left out rather than supplied from memory. Everything else here is a preference; that one is the rule the catalogue rests on.
Sources are read for what they can settle: a diagnostic manual for what the manual says, the survey that produced a figure for the figure, the dictionary entry that dates a word for the date. Where a source states a number and cites nothing, the entry says so, and this figure circulates with no survey behind it is one of the most useful sentences on many of these pages. Attribution sits inside the sentence that makes the claim, with the name and the year, because that is what survives being quoted somewhere else.
Before an entry can be published, a checker has to pass on it: the answer in the first paragraph, the headings, every internal link, the punctuation, the third person, and the absence of any advice. It fails the build rather than leaving a warning. What it cannot check is whether a fact came from the material, which is why that rule is enforced by the method rather than by a script.
Entries are written in British English, revised rather than reissued, and each one prints the date it was added and the date it was last revised. The changelog records what changed across the catalogue, and the last revision was 2026-08-26.
What this site will not do
No diagnosis and no advice. No self-test, no symptom checker, no quiz that hands somebody a verdict. The entries say what has been studied and stop, and nothing here is a substitute for a clinician who can examine a person.
No advertising and no affiliate placement. Not on an entry page, not anywhere, at any price. The highest-volume searches in this subject are people asking whether something is wrong with them, and a reference site that monetises that question has become the thing it set out to describe.
No score and no ranking. No popularity index and no league table of fears. The four labels say the useful thing without pretending to arithmetic.
No tracking and no byline. There is no analytics script, no pixel, no advertising network, no account and no cookie, and every page is a static file, so no server holds a record of what anybody read. The catalogue publishes as an organisation rather than under a name, because what it asks a reader to trust is the label and the sources rather than a person.
How to quote an entry
Quoting is expected. Attribute the entry rather than the site, since the claim belongs to one page: PHOBIASpec, the entry name, its URL and the date it was last revised. Carry the label with the claim, because a figure quoted without it loses the thing this catalogue is for, and treat a sentence saying that something has never been measured as a finding rather than as an omission.
Start anywhere: the A–Z index lists every entry on one page, the categories group them by what is feared, and the collections are the arguments, from the words nobody has ever used to the fears studied by everybody except psychiatry.