The index · 284 entries
Browse every phobia by category and record
The catalogue holds 284 phobia and fear terms, and every one carries a label for what the record behind the word holds rather than for the fear itself. 31 are named in a diagnostic manual, 66 have clinical literature under that name, 115 rest on case reports or a historical record, and 72 appear only in dictionaries and word lists. Filtering to coined returns that last list, which is the one most phobia sites print without saying so.
Recognised
31Named in DSM-5-TR or ICD-11Studied
66Real clinical literature under this nameDocumented
115Case reports or historical record onlyCoined
72In dictionaries and lists, no clinical literature284 entries
- A Surgeon's Fear of OperatingA fear that your own movements will disastrously affect the world around you. For a surgeon that is not a metaphor, which is why the word attached to them.
- AcephobiaTwo studies found asexual people rated as less human than other orientations, and a built-in control for unfamiliarity failed to explain the result.
- AgoraphobiaWestphal coined it in 1871 from agora, the marketplace. The situations it covers include queues, cinemas and being at home alone. What unites them is escape.
- AnglophobiaA Glasgow study measured Anglophobia and Islamophobia side by side and found the same predictors. The object of the prejudice was close to interchangeable.
- ArithmomaniaEuropean folklore gave vampires a compulsion to count scattered seeds, which is the condition described centuries before anyone named it.
- BiphobiaIts commonest form is not hostility but denial that the category exists. Its synonym, monosexism, names the belief rather than the feeling and fits better.
- ClaustrophobiaRachman and Taylor showed in 1993 that two beliefs drive this fear, and neither is about how small the room is. What the record holds, including the miners.
- CounterphobiaThe minority response to anxiety seeks the feared thing out. Fenichel's warning is the useful part: dismantling the defence is only the first step of treatment.
- Distrust of AlgorithmsAlgorithm aversion is rejecting from a system the advice you would take from a person. It reverses by task, which is what makes it a judgement rather than a fear.
- DoomscrollingDoomscrolling is reading bad news past the point where it helps. The word arrived in 2018, the behaviour was measured in the 1970s as mean world syndrome.
- Eco-AnxietyNot a diagnosis, and the researchers say so before anything else. Two people are credited with the name, and every figure in circulation is self-described.
- Existential DreadMarcel coined existentialism and later abandoned it, Sartre rejected it before adopting it in 1945, and the nineteenth-century figures died before the word existed.
- Extreme Picky EatingBody image disturbance is not a root cause of it. The three routes in are sensory difficulty, fear of what eating causes, and simply no interest in food.
- Fear of AbandonmentFeeling rejected activates the brain's physical pain centres and leaves an imprint in its warning system. Most people who experience it meet no diagnostic criteria.
- Fear of AccidentsDystychiphobia is the fear of accidents, a word that lives in phobia lists rather than in clinics. Its object is a probability, which is why it hides inside other fears.
- Fear of AgeingHe bent forward so he would not look tall, ate less to stunt his growth, and pitched his voice higher to sound younger. He was twelve when it started.
- Fear of AlcoholThe reference books give potophobia three words. The laboratory work on alcohol and fear runs the other way, and found it damps anxiety but not fear.
- Fear of AnimalsWhat predicts fear of an animal is perceiving it as dangerous, disgusting and uncontrollable. Whether anything ever happened to the person does not.
- Fear of AntsBoth forms of this fear take the colony as their object, not the insect. The only study attached to the word tested clips from the Ant-Man films.
- Fear of Bad BreathHalitophobia is the belief that you have bad breath when nobody else can smell it. Estimates of its share of the complaint run from five to seventy-two per cent.
- Fear of Bathing and WashingAvoiding washing and washing compulsively are filed under one term, and the encyclopedia routes both to obsessive-compulsive disorder without saying how they meet.
- Fear of BatsThe paper carrying the word in its title argues the fear is too narrow: almost entirely about rabies, when the list of bat-borne viruses runs to several dozen.
- Fear of BeardsAttested in 1851 of Jesuits reacting to a beard's politics. What is read is the decision to grow one, not the hair, and Watson conditioned it in a boy in the 1920s.
- Fear of Beautiful WomenThe word survives as a single sentence inside an article about gynophobia, and that sentence is the whole of what anyone has written about it.
- Fear of BeesApiphobia is a fear of the sting rather than the insect, and the one phobia whose diagnosis can be settled by an allergy test. What the record holds on it.
- Fear of Being AloneThe source has to deny both readings because people reach both. It names a fear of being alone, and people with it suffer in company as well as in solitude.
- Fear of Being Buried AliveIts own reference article concedes the fear was not entirely irrational before modern medicine. William Tebb collected 149 accounts of actual live burial in 1905.
- Fear of Being Cursed to DeathA man fell ill after a bone was pointed at him and recovered the moment he was told it was a mistake. Cannon argued in 1942 that fear alone can kill.
- Fear of Being HexedTwo colonial statutes, in 1748 and 1749, record a fear of hexing by Black folk practitioners. The tradition they targeted was mostly used for protection.
- Fear of Being Laughed AtTitze noticed patients who moved like wooden puppets when they thought they were being laughed at. They also cannot tell friendly teasing from ridicule.
- Fear of Being PhotographedNo Greek word was ever built for this fear. English carries an adjective, camera-shy, and the material behind it describes shyness rather than cameras.
- Fear of Being RobbedRobbery is legally theft by force or fear, so the fear sits inside the offence, and the word for fearing it gets seven words in print.
- Fear of Being ScratchedThe reference entry names its own exception: for someone with a severe allergy to scratches, hair or fleas, it calls the fear quite appropriate rather than excessive.
- Fear of Being Stared AtA psychiatric journal described it in 1906 better than most sources since. It is classed as both a social and a specific phobia, and has never been counted on its own.
- Fear of Being Tied UpRope, handcuffs, chains, and also seatbelts, thread and tape. When thread is on the avoidance list the object is not the material but the fastening.
- Fear of Being TouchedThe clinical record offers a definition and a list of symptoms. The only accounts of where the fear comes from are in fiction, and they say abuse, consistently.
- Fear of Being Without a PhoneThe Oxford English Dictionary records nomophobia from 1803, meaning fear of laws. The phone version is a portmanteau produced by a survey in 2008.
- Fear of Belly ButtonsNo study, no figure, and an anatomy page that never mentions the fear. What that page does supply is the point: the navel is a scar, and everybody has one.
- Fear of BirdsBirds cannot be avoided, so this fear ends in closed windows and car-only travel. The reference that classifies it also states that nobody has counted it.
- Fear of BloodVasovagal syncope is uncommon in phobias and routine in this one, which is why blood, needles and injury were classified as a single category in DSM-IV.
- Fear of Blood, Injections and InjuryThe only phobia whose physiology runs backwards, and the only one with a treatment derived from it. Relaxation is the wrong advice; applied tension is the right one.
- Fear of BlushingCrozier showed a blush works because it cannot be controlled, so the fear targets the response that is doing the person good. Surgery for it has a regret rate.
- Fear of Body DeformityVanity aims to exceed other people; this aims to reach them. Concealed for fear of being read as vanity, and carrying some of the worst suicide figures here.
- Fear of Body OdourSeventy-five per cent report bad breath and fifty-nine per cent cannot smell anything themselves. The outcome figures are among the worst in this catalogue.
- Fear of BooksThe clergy and the beadles held the legal and religious documents, and used them on people who could not read. Bibliomania is a hundred years older.
- Fear of BurglarsScelerophobia is the fear of burglars and of people who mean harm. It names the intruder rather than the crime, and the record behind it is one reference entry.
- Fear of ButtonsOne source puts it under one per cent of the United States, another at one in 75,000: three million people against four thousand, and nobody has checked.
- Fear of CancerFifty-nine per cent and 7.75 per cent are both correct: one study ranked cancer against other diseases, the other applied a threshold to a scale.
- Fear of CarsThree words split this fear between the vehicle, the passenger seat and the driver, and the encyclopedia entry rests on a guide for teenagers.
- Fear of CatsAilurophobia is uncommon as animal phobias go, and no survey has ever measured it. Five spellings, one documented case treated with a kitten, and a word collision.
- Fear of Certain PlacesThe OED has one quotation for it, from 1899, and a frequency line flat for twelve decades. The live literature under the word belongs to geography, not psychiatry.
- Fear of ChangeCommensal rodents are thought to have evolved higher neophobia because humans kept inventing new ways to kill them. Two thirds of the food form is genetic.
- Fear of ChemicalsBy weight, 99.99 per cent of the pesticides in a diet are grown by the plants, and twenty-nine of the fifty-seven natural ones tested cause cancer in rodents.
- Fear of ChickensThe one published case, an eighteen-year-old woman in India, appeared in 2017 in a report saying nobody had described the condition before.
- Fear of ChildbirthIt is a common reason women request an elective caesarean, which makes it one of the very few fears that ends in a scheduled surgical procedure.
- Fear of ChildrenA management professor said a critical mass of younger persons produces an explosive increase in crime, and the climate of fear followed from there.
- Fear of ChokingThe difficulty swallowing is authentic and has no physical cause, which is what the name records. Its documented treatments still include a shock to the fingers.
- Fear of ClocksThe clean form is chronometrophobia. The spelling everybody uses has an extra letter and a Latin etymology invented to justify it, which does not work.
- Fear of ClothingVestiphobia is a fear of clothing, usually of one fabric or one garment. One source calls it a word-list term, the other an under-recognised disorder.
- Fear of ClownsThe 2022 survey behind the 54 per cent figure is reported without its authors, and Wikipedia files coulrophobia as a redirect rather than an article.
- Fear of CockroachesThe cockroach beat the snake and the spider on unpleasantness in a rating study, and it had been missing from the standard image sets researchers use.
- Fear of ColorsClinical fears of colour are rare and usually attach to one hue. The same word names an old argument that Western taste has always distrusted colour.
- Fear of CommitmentAvoidance of commitment rises as the quality of non-commitment rises, which is what a comparison looks like rather than what a fear looks like.
- Fear of CookingNot cooking means living on pre-prepared food and takeaway, and that diet is associated with hypertension, obesity and diabetes down the line.
- Fear of COVID-19Coronaphobia is the fear of catching COVID-19. The largest population study of it found the unvaccinated less afraid than the vaccinated.
- Fear of CrimeBetween a third and a half of people in England and Wales report worry about victimisation, and probing finds few worry about their own safety day to day.
- Fear of Crossing BridgesThree bridge authorities have run services driving frightened people across. Mackinac handles a thousand a year, which is the best prevalence evidence the term has.
- Fear of Crossing the RoadAfter a road accident, refusing to cross alone reads as something learned rather than something feared, and the diagnosis stays out of sight.
- Fear of CrowdsThree Greek names, no article, no study and no figure. Every reference resolves it to agoraphobia or claustrophobia, both of which claim the crowd as their own.
- Fear of Death and Dead BodiesNeolithic and ancient Greek burials come up with stones and broken amphora fragments laid over the corpse, placed there to keep it from rising.
- Fear of DepthsA swimmer who can see the bottom may be fine and the same person may not be, ten metres further out. What is feared is unmeasured extent rather than depth.
- Fear of DiabetesDiabetophobia is a cross-reference with nothing behind it. Diabetes distress reached 48.6 percent in one elderly sample, and the fear attaches to complications.
- Fear of DiseaseTuberculosis in 1911, AIDS in 1991, mad cow in the 1990s. Nosophobia holds its shape and swaps its subject for whatever the coverage is carrying.
- Fear of DoctorsThe only fear whose avoidance behaviour damages health directly. Its prevalence has never been reported, and the figure quoted instead measures something else.
- Fear of DogsSixty-two million pet dogs in the United States alone, and every prevalence figure for this fear was collected in a clinic rather than in the street.
- Fear of DollsA horror director explains it better than the clinical record does: a human figure missing emotion, with eyes that stare and nothing behind them.
- Fear of DreamsTwo brain-imaging studies suggest the frightening dream is part of an overnight regulatory process. The avoidance the fear produces removes the mechanism.
- Fear of DrivingBetween a quarter and three quarters of people injured in a serious crash develop it. It also has a symptom nothing else does: the passenger's phantom brake.
- Fear of DrowningThe fear of drowning predicts never learning to swim better than the cost of lessons does, which makes it a fear that raises the risk it names.
- Fear of DucksGary Larson invented it for a Far Side cartoon in 1988. It now has a medical-information page contributed by a physician, with a synonym list.
- Fear of DyingSixty years of named death anxiety scales and not one prevalence figure. What the record holds on thanatophobia, and the places where it holds nothing.
- Fear of Empty RoomsPanic, dread and a racing heart at the sight of a near-empty room. That symptom list comes from a 2009 art review, and it is the fullest account the word has.
- Fear of Environmental CatastropheCoined in a 1988 newspaper column to name fear of an inhospitable planet, it now names the indifference toward nature that is making it that way.
- Fear of EverythingHis definition has not been improved on in a century: anxiety that floats as in a dream and fixes on an object only for an instant before passing to another.
- Fear of EyesStaying away from eyes handles the moment and strengthens the fear, because every avoided encounter supplies a fresh reason for having avoided it.
- Fear of FailureHigh scorers on the fear of negative evaluation scale think they are performing badly and are performing well. Low scorers overestimate their effectiveness.
- Fear of FallingThe fear of falling is measurable in infants who have never fallen, and a Dunedin cohort found it least common in the people who had been hurt.
- Fear of Fat in FoodLipophobia rises where food is abundant and is absent where it is not. Its citations date the movement to the 1980s and name its corporate casualties.
- Fear of Fear ItselfWhat is feared is the sensation of fear, so the trigger travels with the person. Its treatment induces panic deliberately, with caffeine, carbon dioxide or adrenaline.
- Fear of FeathersWiktionary failed the word for want of citations in 2010, and a Nigerian psychiatry journal published the first case report under the name in 2022.
- Fear of FecesA raccoon latrine study found the avoidance tracks susceptibility: tolerant species approach, vulnerable ones stay away. The human account on record is psychoanalytic.
- Fear of FeverFever phobia has been studied since the early 1980s. A meta-analysis found it has not declined in thirty years, which suggests it is cultural.
- Fear of FireOne reference defines a fear of fire; the other adds a fear of starting one, which is a different condition entirely. Neither has a study or a figure behind it.
- Fear of FireworksFirework fear affects 52 percent of dogs and starts in the first year. The treatment data is blunt: only medication and food beat placebo range.
- Fear of FishOne conditioning demonstration, one televised case, and a people described as phobic for a century before the label was withdrawn. What the record on fish fear holds.
- Fear of Flashes of LightA dictionary editor wrote down the pattern during the 2015 review: a fear sense in the word lists, an intolerance sense in a speciality. Both are in use.
- Fear of FlutesOne explanation exists and it is that the flute is a phallic symbol. The clearest use of the word in print is as an example of a fear not worth treating.
- Fear of FlyingAerophobia also names a feature of rabies. Where flight phobia stops being ordinary nerves, and why the prevalence estimates run from 2.5 to 40 per cent.
- Fear of FoodAnorexia is a fear of gaining weight, not of food. The two produce identical plates and identical weight loss, and the treatments point in opposite directions.
- Fear of Foreign LanguagesSituation-specific, so it affects people calm everywhere else. Speaking a language well means briefly becoming somebody slightly different, which is the difficulty.
- Fear of ForestsAristotle took hyle from timber to name matter, and the phobia word inherited both. One reference entry defines it as fear of a forest or fear of materialism.
- Fear of Fresh Air and DraftsA word from 1785 meaning dread of a draught. Merriam-Webster now records only the aviation sense, and the original survives in one place: as a sign in rabies patients.
- Fear of Friday the 13thThe 17 to 21 million figure traces to one Asheville organisation. Two airlines report no drop in travel, and Dutch insurers log fewer accidents on the day.
- Fear of FrogsA published 1983 case describes a woman whose extreme fear dated from the afternoon her mower went over a group of frogs and killed them.
- Fear of Gaining WeightThe penalty this fear anticipates has been measured: worse marriage, education, career and income outcomes. What makes it a disorder is what people do about it.
- Fear of GenitalsCouples in some cultures avoided sex in lit rooms so the vulva stayed unseen, which makes the individual version a private survival of a public rule.
- Fear of GermsWilliam A. Hammond made the word in 1879 describing an OCD case of repeated hand-washing. It now names a specific phobia, which are treated differently.
- Fear of GhostsWikipedia calls fear of ghosts very common and names no survey. What stands in for a research record: a Wari' spectre, a Papuan funeral racket, one philosopher.
- Fear of GodIn every tradition here the phrase means awe and reverence. Catholic writers have spent a century correcting it: servile fear against filial fear.
- Fear of Going to SchoolA child in genuine morning agony returns to a stable mood the instant it is settled they are not going. That recovery, not the stomach ache, is the tell.
- Fear of GovernmentFour vocabularies cover the fear of the state and none of them is clinical, from politicophobia and anti-statism to measured political alienation.
- Fear of GunsCoined by a firearms writer in the 1960s, and Wikipedia files it beside gun nut under terms applied to opponents. Both sides of the argument own guns.
- Fear of HairThe word dates from 1977 and has no case behind it. The documented hostility about hair is racial discrimination, and it has health data and legislation.
- Fear of Hair LossDermatology lists it among the manifestations of delusional disorder on the scalp, beside delusion of parasitosis, rather than among the phobias.
- Fear of HappinessIf cultures differ in how much they fear happiness, happiness indices measure different things in different places. A six-country study found the differences are real.
- Fear of HeadachesThe fear operates during the pain-free stretch, and what it produces is a painkiller swallowed early for a headache that has not started yet.
- Fear of Heart DiseasePeople with a fear disorder had 1.8 times the odds of later heart disease. The anxiety is about an outcome that anxiety is a risk factor for.
- Fear of HeatPharmacy, biology, physics and medicine all use the word, and none of them means a fear. The medical sense is heat intolerance and points at the thyroid.
- Fear of HeightsWikipedia gives 2 to 5 per cent and names no survey. What a Dunedin birth cohort found about childhood falls, and why vertigo is the wrong word for it.
- Fear of Home SurroundingsIn psychiatry it would mean fear of the bathtub and the light switches. In practice it means whatever the person using it wants it to mean.
- Fear of HorsesFreud's Little Hans is still the reference point for this fear, and the article that cites treatment studies names none. What the record actually holds.
- Fear of HospitalsThe fear and the thing feared are built from one Greek word: nosokomeion gives both the phobia and the adjective for an infection caught in hospital.
- Fear of HousesOikophobia has meant wanderlust, hatred of housework and cultural self-rejection. Domatophobia is the term left holding the literal fear of a house.
- Fear of ImagesCollinson separated hating images from destroying them, and dated the extreme phase to little more than one generation after 1580.
- Fear of ImperfectionMaladaptive perfectionism has a name most people have not met, and a dated trend: rising among young people in higher education since the late 1980s.
- Fear of InfinityNo object can be brought into the room. What produces the panic is an intrusive thought, and one neuroscientist thinks the real subject is the future.
- Fear of InjuryMerriam-Webster ties the word to combat. Wikipedia files it with blood and injections. One definition describes a veteran and the other a patient avoiding a procedure.
- Fear of InsectsAlmost nobody fears insects; they fear cockroaches, or wasps, or moths. The one figure in circulation, six per cent, is credited to a book Wikipedia never names.
- Fear of IntimacyThe existential reading in the literature: loving and being loved raises the value of a life and sharpens the fact that it ends. And what the scale measures.
- Fear of KneesWiktionary has three published citations for the word and still refuses it an entry. The Cleveland Clinic describes two conditions under the one name.
- Fear of LightIt names discomfort or pain in the eyes on exposure to light. In medical usage the suffix means hypersensitivity, and this is the standard example of it.
- Fear of Long WordsThe famous name for the fear of long words is a fifteen-syllable joke. The clinical form is sesquipedalophobia, and it has no cases behind it either.
- Fear of Losing Vital EssenceChills, nausea and flu-like symptoms running for weeks after a single orgasm, on the reasoning that what left the body was a reserve and not a fluid.
- Fear of MachinesShredders, grinders, chainsaws and overlockers are the named triggers, and the usual route in is an accident. A 1931 book blamed sexual incompetence.
- Fear of Making DecisionsWalter Kaufmann coined it in 1973, and the argument comes from Kierkegaard: the freedom to make a decision that may change us is what breeds the anxiety.
- Fear of Medical ProceduresOne American in three avoids the doctor when they think they need one. The clinical term for the severe form of that has never been counted.
- Fear of MenThe fear of women is an inclusion term in ICD-11 and the fear of men is a dictionary line, though the wordbooks present the two as a pair.
- Fear of Mice and RatsMusophobia, murophobia, suriphobia: three languages for one fear, a DSM-5 classification, a patron saint, and no clinical study under any spelling.
- Fear of MirrorsTwo current sources disagree about whether eisoptrophobia, spectrophobia and catoptrophobia are one condition or three. One patient gave up a driving licence.
- Fear of Missing OutThe 2004 article that named FOMO also named FOBO, fear of a better option. One is about what happens elsewhere, the other about the choice already in hand.
- Fear of MonstersOne word, two definitions in circulation. The encyclopedia records a fear that can end in a decision not to have children. The lists record the monster under the bed.
- Fear of Movement and Re-InjuryA fear of movement that lengthens the disability it comes from, and whose strongest predictor is self-rated health rather than how much pain there is.
- Fear of MushroomsCoined in 1957 to sort cultures into mushroom-loving and mushroom-fearing. A study in Chiapas tested the split and found a bell curve instead.
- Fear of MusicThe only Wikipedia article under the name is a rock album, and the band's redefinition of the word is the most considered account of it that exists.
- Fear of NatureBiophobia has no clinical record, and the biophilia hypothesis counts a fear of nature as evidence for an inborn attachment to living things.
- Fear of NeedlesRecognised by DSM-IV in 1994, and the one phobia type whose blood pressure falls instead of rising. Its four subtype shares add up to 110 per cent.
- Fear of NothingnessNo dictionary carries the word, while the thing it names was argued over from Parmenides to the barometer that produced a vacuum in 1643.
- Fear of Nuclear WarNewcomb's 1986 instrument scored nuclear denial alongside nuclear worry, and the literature admits its 1980s findings cannot now be replicated.
- Fear of NudityChanging rooms, showers, gyms, hostels, hotel rooms, pools, beaches and medical facilities. Most sufferers route around all of it and cope.
- Fear of NumbersTrouble holding certain jobs, trouble paying bills, trouble managing a budget. This is a fear whose damage arrives as administration, not drama.
- Fear of OdoursIt appears in migraine histories, helps separate migraine from tension headache, and turns up in a quarter of sufferers. Nobody is afraid of the smell.
- Fear of Offending OthersThe same avoidance as social phobia running in the opposite direction. The fear is of offending others, and the person withdraws in order to spare them.
- Fear of Old PeopleThe medieval view was favourable. The turn came around the Anglo-Saxon period and the literature has been getting harsher ever since.
- Fear of Open High PlacesTwo roots welded together to make a word no dictionary can find in use. The useful part of its entry is the line separating it from airsickness.
- Fear of Other People's OpinionsEvery site defines it as fearing what others think. The encyclopedia adds a second object nobody quotes: fearing the opinions you hold yourself.
- Fear of PainGuarding, hypervigilance and avoidance are all meant to reduce pain and in the long term worsen it. At least ten per cent of adults have pain outlasting the injury.
- Fear of PalindromesThe word is a palindrome, built by reversing its own suffix. Two sources give two origins four years apart and neither names the person who did it.
- Fear of ParasitesBetween five and eight in ten people with this condition bring collected evidence in a small container. It is not a phobia, though parasitophobia is one of its names.
- Fear of People in Masks and CostumesIt arrives before the age of eight, and children only begin developing facial recognition at about six and reach adult skill at fourteen.
- Fear of PhilosophyThe Oxford English Dictionary dates it to 1853 and records a frequency that fell twentyfold by the 1920s. The word peaked when it was coined.
- Fear of Phone CallsA 2024 UK survey found a quarter of eighteen to thirty-four year olds had never once picked up an incoming call to their own mobile phone.
- Fear of PigsHitchens coined porcophobia in 2007 to pair with porcophilia. The pork taboo still has no settled explanation, ecological, medical or arbitrary.
- Fear of PleasureOne proposed origin is solidarity with the world's poorest countries, which turns enjoying anything at all into something that feels unearned.
- Fear of PoisonOne logician would take food from nobody else. One dictator built a palace without ventilation. Both were afraid of the same thing.
- Fear of PolioPoliosophobia names the fear of catching polio. The fear that halted a vaccination campaign in three Nigerian states in 2003 was of the vaccine.
- Fear of PornographyThe first recorded use of pornophobia, in 1968, called it a mental condition. Britain's Longford Report shows what the aversion did to the trade it opposed.
- Fear of Public SpeakingNo coiner, no date of first use and no population survey. One study of university students, and a treatment literature that now runs through a headset.
- Fear of RadiationChernobyl evacuees lost seven years of life expectancy, and a radiation specialist names depression, alcoholism and suicide rather than cancer.
- Fear of RelativesSyngenesophobia gets four words in the reference books and three citations, all of them lists of odd phobias. Its longest text is a fan fiction.
- Fear of Religious SinOnly somebody inside the tradition can tell devout practice from compulsion, so clinicians work with clergy. Its prognosis is worse than other OCD cases.
- Fear of ReptilesWikipedia's list of feared reptiles ends with dinosaurs, which tells the reader what this fear is not organised around. No statistics exist under the term.
- Fear of ResponsibilityOne word covers both a fear of taking responsibility and a fear of neglecting it, while the measured effect in the area contains no fear.
- Fear of Returning HomeNostalgia and nostophobia divide one Greek root between them: the pain of not returning home and the fear of doing it. Only one was ever a diagnosis.
- Fear of RobotsSeven fear categories came out of 49 studies, and only one is about how the robot looks. One of the other six is a fear of coming to rely on it.
- Fear of Robots Turning Against UsAsimov coined it in 1947 and conceded in the same story that the fear had a certain justification, which is why the First Law exists at all.
- Fear of Roller CoastersThe ride works as pleasure only while the negative emotion stays tolerable. Past that line the same track delivers a cortisol dose.
- Fear of ScabiesA 2026 study found people who feared scabies before catching it had roughly double the anxiety afterwards, while the itch itself predicted behaviour instead.
- Fear of Semen LossFiled as a culture-bound syndrome of South Asia, though European proto-psychiatry worried about the same anxiety under the name spermatorrhea.
- Fear of SexIt names one end of a measured personality dimension, and where a person scores predicts their sexual knowledge, their openness and their condom use.
- Fear of Sexual AbuseThe reference entry locates the fear in the person at risk. The version with any documented presence is a parent's, and it produces screening rather than avoidance.
- Fear of Sexual IntercourseThe Greek root means offspring and the Latin root means the act itself, and what people actually describe is usually neither of those two things.
- Fear of SharksTwo reference works define galeophobia as two unrelated animals. The clinical record is empty; what exists is a decade of newspaper coverage and a film from 1975.
- Fear of Sharp ObjectsThe general word keeps being used for needle phobia, which matters: one responds to ordinary exposure and the other belongs to the subtype that ends in fainting.
- Fear of ShellfishThree of the four reasons people avoid shellfish are precaution, religion and allergy. The fullest account of the word is a video game achievement.
- Fear of SinGreek had one word for missing a target, making a mistake and sinning, so the fear built on it means all three. The documented condition is called scrupulosity.
- Fear of Skin LesionsDermatophobia names a fear of skin lesions, and also served for decades as a name for delusional parasitosis, where the lesions are self-inflicted.
- Fear of SleepThe Fear of Sleep Inventory resolved into four factors in women reporting sexual trauma and into nothing coherent in women reporting other traumas.
- Fear of SlimeThree citations proved blennophobia exists, and a Wiktionary editor noticed all three stop to define it. That is how most phobia words behave.
- Fear of SnakesOne pairing conditions it permanently and Mineka's macaques had to be shown. The third of adults said to fear snakes has no survey behind it.
- Fear of SnowWeather cannot be walked around, so the avoidance described is moving to a warmer climate or not leaving the house between November and March.
- Fear of SoundThe name says loud; the reported sounds are a door closing and something in the kitchen. The line between it and hyperacusis decides what treatment is safe.
- Fear of SpidersWikipedia puts arachnophobia at 3.5 to 6.1 per cent of the world and names no survey. What its account of the fear does and does not support.
- Fear of StandingIn the conversion-disorder form the sway is wild and the recovery is always at the last moment, which no neurological lesion arranges.
- Fear of Stars and Celestial SpaceOne vowel from astraphobia and constantly swapped with it. A religious movement published a second definition in 2020 and copyrighted it.
- Fear of StingsCnidophobia is used for bee stings, but its root is the phylum name for jellyfish and sea anemones. No word exists for the fear of jellyfish.
- Fear of StrangersStranger anxiety runs to a timetable, peaks before a child's first birthday, and is graded by the stranger's height, sex and distance.
- Fear of Submerged Man-Made ObjectsMost sufferers name no trauma and no triggering event, reporting instead that symptoms arrived after a lifetime of ordinary contact.
- Fear of SuccessThe fear of success is named after a prophet who fled his commission, and the Greek words nearby all turn out to mean fear of failure.
- Fear of SurgeryChildren fear the masked figure and the separation; adults fear the pain afterwards. A quarter of cataract patients feared blindness from the operation preventing it.
- Fear of SwallowingThe reviews call it rare and quote a prevalence of 7 to 9 per cent in the same paragraph. The DSM files it as a phobia and ICD-11 as an eating disorder.
- Fear of Taking MedicationA drug given at too high a dose can create the fear outright, and starting low with slow increases prevents it from forming at all.
- Fear of Taking TestsHighly test-anxious students score twelve percentile points below their peers, and the literature is clear it is not about preparation or intellect.
- Fear of TechnologyParliament made demolishing a machine a capital offence in 1727, and the Luddites, who arrived later, objected to something more specific than machines.
- Fear of TeenagersSociology studies it, not psychiatry. Before the 1940s the word teenager was missing from headlines, and Columbine had cameras running and police inside.
- Fear of the BathroomFalling in, something coming out, infection, being overheard. Four fears in one room, and the reference entry admits nobody has ever asked how many people have them.
- Fear of the Colour BlackHealth publishers define it as a fear of the colour black. Every citation before 1921 is about race, and Blyden preferred it to colorphobia as more exact.
- Fear of the Colour PurpleThe literature grants it a single definition. The wider colour-fear vocabulary is described as existing mostly in lists of exotic words.
- Fear of the DarkThe object of this fear cannot be produced, which is why reassurance fails. Two real prevalence figures exist for it and they are constantly quoted as one.
- Fear of the DentistAvoidance creates the painful problem that forces an emergency visit, which deepens the fear. The literature calls that loop the cycle of dental fear.
- Fear of the Evil EyeAmulets against it go back five thousand years, and the Latin charm used to deflect it gives the English word fascinate. Where it is absent is the map.
- Fear of the Great Mole RatZemmiphobia names a fear of an animal with no settled common name, and every published use of the word is a joke about phobia lists.
- Fear of the MindThree unrelated meanings share the word: discrimination against the mentally ill, a distaste for psychology, and resistance to knowing one's own mind.
- Fear of the Number 13Isador Coriat had the word in print by 1910. No manual carries it and no survey counts it, so the evidence is a habit of numbering: floors, decks, plates.
- Fear of the Number 17Rearrange XVII, the Roman numeral for seventeen, and it spells VIXI, I have lived, which is to say I am dead. The Romans may have noticed first.
- Fear of the Number 4Four sounds like death in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and not in Vietnamese, which has no such superstition. It removes floors, ship numbers and aircraft registrations.
- Fear of the Number 666Papyrus 115, the oldest surviving text of Revelation 13, gives the number as 616. Two spellings of Nero's name produce the two numbers, which explains both.
- Fear of the Opposite SexFour words in one reference work and a fear that states can hold in the other. Its measured effect is on what a patient will say once the doctor uses a euphemism.
- Fear of the PenisA sparsely documented literal fear shares its spelling with a term of argument about masculinity, prudery and legal double standards.
- Fear of the SeaA bath is not thalassophobic and a lake is. Four incompatible explanations for the fear, one film blamed for it, and no prevalence figure anywhere.
- Fear of the SunFour medical conditions make sunlight genuinely painful, and the fear can produce the same sensation without them. What the record on heliophobia holds.
- Fear of Thunder and LightningIts defining behaviour is surveillance, not avoidance: weather networks, storm tracking, no leaving the house before checking. Westefeld named the pattern in 1996.
- Fear of Time PassingDescribed in prison inmates and identified again in quarantine during the pandemic. Time is a poor object for a phobia until it is something being served.
- Fear of Tornadoes and HurricanesWikipedia's own etymology section calls this term a fallacious neologism. The correct form is lailapophobia, and the fear underneath it is often trauma.
- Fear of Touching a DoorknobA doorknob is the one surface in a building that cannot be routed around, which is where a contamination fear stops being manageable in private.
- Fear of TrainsEisenbahnangst translated piece by piece into Greek. Freud had the fear, called it Reiseangst, and travelled constantly anyway. What the record actually holds.
- Fear of TravelFlying, driving, trains, sea travel and agoraphobia are all listed as related. What is left is anticipation, over-planning, and Freud's anxiety that ended on departure.
- Fear of TreesThe encyclopedia gives dendrophobia one line. Frost, Chekhov's critic and a 1914 naturalist all use it for hostility to trees, not fear of them.
- Fear of TuberculosisHospital staff who thought their work was infecting them were told they had a phobia. The risk was confirmed in the 1920s and conceded internationally in the 1950s.
- Fear of TunnelsGephyrophobia covers bridges and tunnels, but its name means bridge and its article has admitted since 2021 that the tunnel half is missing.
- Fear of Turning CannibalIts two symptoms are a craving for human flesh and a fear of becoming a cannibal. The second is a fear of one's own capacity, which cannot be avoided.
- Fear of TyrantsThe United States has never had a dictatorship, and two legal scholars argue the fear of one has blocked reforms the country needed.
- Fear of UglinessLess a fear than a documented prejudice, and one that several jurisdictions have now decided to prohibit as a form of discrimination outright.
- Fear of Undressing in Front of SomeoneOnly Abrahamic societies among ancient civilisations tied nakedness to sexual shame. Elsewhere the embarrassment was about poverty, and Japan and Finland kept the baths.
- Fear of VaccinesAutism in English, multiple sclerosis in French, infertility in Nigeria. The fear crosses every border and the specific accusation never does.
- Fear of Venereal DiseaseOne word for the infection and for the act, which is the confusion the moral history of these diseases rests on. The name comes from an epithet of Aphrodite.
- Fear of VomitingCommon, chronic and described in its own literature as an elusive predicament. It is regularly misdiagnosed as OCD, anorexia, social anxiety or agoraphobia.
- Fear of WaspsWikipedia calls it relatively common and gives it three sentences. The best account of how it starts is a gardening book about wasps inside split fruit.
- Fear of WaterHydrophobia was already in use for a symptom of rabies, so the fear of water took a Latin root. Three prevalence studies exist for it and none agrees with the others.
- Fear of Wi-Fi and Electromagnetic FieldsResidents blamed a South African cell tower for their symptoms, and the operator told the meeting it had been switched off six weeks earlier.
- Fear of WindA fear inferred entirely from moving trees and waves, described in an article that names no study, no researcher and no figure. What actually survives the description.
- Fear of WomenAttested from 1886 and rising in frequency in every decade since. ICD-11 lists it as an inclusion term under social anxiety disorder, which almost nothing here has.
- Fear of WorkWilliam Upson defined it as the art of laziness and a morbid fear of work in one breath. Its own source now cautions that people mistake occupational stress for it.
- Fear of Writing in PublicCash bought in advance, deposit slips filled in at home, money handed to somebody else. The fear is of the hand shaking, and the anxiety makes it shake.
- Fright SicknessDSM-5 lists susto as a Cultural Concept of Distress rather than a disorder. The account is soul-loss after a sudden fright, and the treatments follow that logic.
- GermanophobiaMade in Germany began in 1887 as a warning label. Berlin, Ontario became Kitchener in 1916. Germanophobia left most of its record on maps.
- Ghost SicknessA federal ban removed traditional mourning practices, and a Lakota expert connects that loss to a later predisposition to pathological grief.
- Health AnxietyHypochondriasis carries a five-year shorter life expectancy, and the DSM-5 deleted the diagnosis in 2013, splitting its population three to one.
- Health Anxiety From Online SearchingTwo in five say the web raises their medical anxiety and about half say it lowers it. The condition is a minority outcome of a majority behaviour.
- HibernophobiaA papal bull of 1155 called the Irish rude and barbarous, and Gerald of Wales called them lazy. Both descriptions stayed in print for centuries.
- Holy AnorexiaBrumberg argues it vanished because the coding changed, not the motives. A woman fasting to commune with Christ today would be recorded as anorexia nervosa.
- HomophobiaGeorge Weinberg's word moved the diagnosis from the gay person to the one hating them, a year before the manual changed. Its 1969 debut meant the near-reverse.
- Impostor SyndromeMcElwee and Yurak found the standard instruments measure general negative affect rather than the belief that defines the phenomenon. It is in neither DSM-5 nor ICD-11.
- IndophobiaThomas Trautmann traced Indophobia to a deliberate evangelical and utilitarian campaign that displaced an earlier British enthusiasm for India.
- IslamophobiaA word that copies homophobia, which may copy hydrophobia, the old name for rabies. Three coinages deep, and nobody checked what the suffix was doing.
- JapanophobiaIn 1939, 87.7 per cent of Japanese Brazilians read Japanese newspapers. In 1942 the newspapers, the schools and the radios were all taken away.
- JudeophobiaA physician coined it in 1882, called it a hereditary and incurable psychic disorder, and concluded from the diagnosis that arguing against it was pointless.
- Kayak AngstA panic condition triggered by a mirror-calm sea reflecting cloud, so up cannot be told from down. Up to a fifth of Greenlandic seal hunters were said to have it.
- LesbophobiaThe word dates to 1972. At least 38 jurisdictions criminalise sex between women explicitly, and corrective rape was named after a killing in 2008.
- MisophoniaLoudness is not the variable and the reaction is anger, not fear. Why the surveys report anything from 2 to 18 per cent, and why none of them is named.
- MorgellonsNamed in 2002 from Sir Thomas Browne's description of children in Languedoc. A multi-year CDC investigation reported in 2012 that the fibres were cotton.
- Old Hag SyndromeThe weight on the chest, the paralysis, the presence and its hostility all have physiological accounts. Up to half of people experience it at some point.
- OrthorexiaNamed in 1997 for dietary restriction undertaken for health that produces the opposite. Equal in men and women, and still in neither DSM nor ICD.
- Peter Pan SyndromeRecognised by neither the WHO nor the DSM, and its seven markers still come from Dan Kiley's books. Two of the seven are defined by the sex of the other person.
- Phantom Phone VibrationsMichael Rothberg calls it a tactile hallucination, and up to nine in ten people get it. The sensation has to be learned first, over one month to a year.
- Range AnxietyCoined in print in 1997 about GM EV1 drivers, trademarked for by General Motors in 2010. The AAA's stated cure is owning an electric vehicle.
- RomaphobiaAntiziganism is built on a root meaning untouchable, and the commonest English word comes from a mistake about Egypt. The vocabulary records the prejudice.
- RussophobiaThe Westminster Review called it an epidemic disease in 1836. Tyutchev coined the Russian form in 1867 and aimed it at Russian liberals, not foreigners.
- ScanxietyFifty-seven studies used 81 measurement tools between them and reported prevalence from 0 to 83 per cent. The one agreed finding: the wait is the worst part.
- Selective MutismUntil 1994 it was elective mutism, and the older name accused the person of choosing. The current one is still disputed for implying the same thing.
- Separation Anxiety DisorderAround three quarters of children with the disorder refuse school, and up to eighty per cent of school refusers meet its criteria. The overlap runs both ways.
- Shy Bladder SyndromeSix American state prison systems have amended their drug testing rules for it, and UK probation guidance has accepted it since 2005. No test can confirm it.
- Shy Bowel SyndromeA study of 714 students put avoidance at 14.4 per cent. No manual carries the condition, and the therapy everyone recommends has no trial behind it.
- SinophobiaSinophobia produced the first US immigration law aimed at one nationality, in 1882. Its later record is legislation, polling and assault, not sentiment.
- Social Anxiety DisorderThe definition covers positive evaluation as well as negative, which separates it from shyness. Attention to the diagnosis rose from 1999, when drugs arrived.
- SolastalgiaGlenn Albrecht named the distress of a home environment changing around a person who has not moved. Wealth reliably softens it, and poverty does not.
- Spirit SicknessThe ritual that ends this Korean spirit sickness is the one that inducts a new shaman. Symptoms last an average of eight years and sometimes thirty.
- Stage FrightIt can start thirty-six hours before the performance. Propranolol takes away the shaking and the racing heart and leaves the nervousness exactly where it was.
- TechnostressOlder workers report less technology stress than younger ones, and women report less than men. Only computer literacy behaves the way anyone expects.
- TransphobiaIts own reference article says it is not a clinical phobia. The best predictor of the attitude turns out to be a different prejudice entirely.
- TrypophobiaCoined on a forum in 2005, studied from 2013, listed in no diagnostic manual, and measured once: 16 per cent of 286 people rating a single photograph.
- Uncanny ValleyMori proposed it in 1970, and the sharpest account is about category: a figure in the valley reads as a person failing to seem normal, not a machine succeeding.
- White Coat SyndromeUp to thirty per cent of mild hypertension diagnosed from clinic readings is this effect. People showing it do not look frightened and their heart rate does not rise.
- XenophobiaThe encyclopedia of phobias gives it three words. The working definition is about group boundaries, and one sociologist counts admiration as the same act.
- Zoom FatigueA condition with a growth curve behind it. The pain is in the neck and shoulders, and one survey found seventy-two per cent of respondents working from bed.
How to read the list
What the record label is doing on every row
The label answers a question about the word, not about the person who holds the fear. A term marked coined can name a real and common fear; it means only that nothing has been published under that name. A term marked recognised is one a diagnostic manual lists, which is a much smaller set than a list of phobia words suggests.
The distinction matters because phobia lists circulate without it. A page that prints four hundred words in one column implies four hundred conditions, and the collections exist partly to take that apart: the words with no recorded use, the words that are not fears at all, and the fears that are sometimes correct are each set out as their own argument.
Reading by subject instead of by record works the other way round. The 13 categories group terms by what the fear takes as its object and each prints the rule it files by, while the A to Z drops every structure and lists all 284 names in order, with the formal term beside each.
Common questions
Questions about the list of phobias
How many phobias are there?
This catalogue lists 284, which is a count of words rather than of conditions. Only 31 of them are named in a diagnostic manual; 72 exist in dictionaries and word lists with no clinical literature under the name at all. Any total that runs to hundreds is counting the vocabulary, not the diagnoses.
What do the four record labels mean?
Recognised means the term is named in DSM-5-TR or ICD-11. Studied means real clinical literature exists under that name. Documented means case reports or a historical record only. Coined means the word appears in dictionaries and word lists and nothing has been published on it. The label describes the record, never the fear.
Which phobias are the most common?
Prevalence is filterable here, but the honest answer is that it is measured for very few terms: 31 entries are named in a diagnostic manual and most of the catalogue carries no survey figure at all. The commonality filter reports what the sources support and marks the rest as unknown rather than guessing.
Why do some entries have no formal term?
Because none was ever coined. 244 of the 284 entries carry a formal Greek or Latin name and the rest are known only by the plain description of the fear, which is itself a fact about the record: a fear can be well documented and unnamed, and a word can be well formed and unused.
Can the list be sorted or narrowed?
Yes. The catalogue filters by category, by which of the four record labels a term carries and by how common the fear is, and sorts alphabetically or by how well attested the term is. Choosing a category opens that category's own page rather than filtering in place, so every group stays a real address with its own filing rule.