Version history

Added

• A missing page prints the address that failed and then the entries whose names come nearest to it. Typing arachnaphobia finds the fear of spiders, claustrofobia finds claustrophobia, and an address with no near match says so rather than offering the least bad guess.
• The match is made on letter pairs rather than on exact spelling, so it is close to indifferent to the two ways lookup fails in this subject: the Greek name written from memory, and the everyday name typed for a fear the record files under Greek.

Changed

• The plate on the homepage sits beside the definition of a phobia rather than nowhere, and every category and collection page dropped the caption under its artwork. The caption labelled a picture that was plainly an emblem of the group, and next to a placeholder it labelled nothing at all.
• The footer stopped ending two of its columns with an arrowed link. Both are now ordinary rows of the list they belong to, separated by a hairline.

Fixed

• Every entry carries its formal term and its spellings, and none of them resolved: searching for arachnophobia, chionophobia or koumpounophobia produced a page that did not exist, while the everyday name worked. The site's own search had always found them, so the failure was invisible from inside. All 634 now redirect to the entry they belong to.
• Building that map found eighteen faults nothing else would have caught. Twelve Greek terms were claimed by two entries at once, including aerophobia, which meant dread of a draught for two centuries before it meant flight, and gynophobia, which two entries held. Each went to the entry named after it, and the losing entry keeps the word in its list of names, so nothing dropped out of search.

Added

• Five collections, written from the arguments the entries were already making. Words Nobody Has Ever Used holds the terms with no case and no prevalence, including the one a cartoonist invented as a joke and the one that is its own suffix spelled backwards. Fears Studied by Everybody Except Psychiatry holds the fears whose research belongs to swimming instructors, paediatricians and vets. When the Suffix Is an Accusation holds the prejudice words. One Word, Two Different Fears holds the collisions. Fears That Are Right About Their Object holds the awkward cases for the rule that a phobia is out of proportion to its danger.
• Entry bodies can carry a table now, and the hubs can carry links. A category intro and a collection thesis were the only prose on the site with nothing linked inside them, which made the pages that rank for the broad queries the least connected in the catalogue.

Changed

• The about page was rewritten. It had been claiming that every source is listed at the foot of an entry, which the entry pages do not do, and that entry bodies carry no links, which stopped being true when the entries started linking each other. It now describes how an entry is actually made, what a label does not mean, and what the site collects, which is nothing: no analytics, no cookies, no account, no server log.

Content

• New entries: fear of falling, fear of drowning, fear of strangers, fear of nature, fear of success, fear of men, fear of cars, fear of being robbed, fear of responsibility, fear of nothingness, fear of being photographed and fear of government. Each was written from sources fetched for it rather than from the entries that referred to it, and each states how thin its record is: three of the twelve rest on a dictionary line and a printed gloss, and say so.
• The thirteenth name, fear of foreigners, was not written. It is xenophobia under another label, and the single reference to it now points there instead of at a page that would have duplicated one.
• Every cross-reference in the catalogue now resolves to a page that exists.

Content

• Sixty-three answers across thirty-two entries were rewritten to carry the source, the figure or the date that the short version had dropped. Three more entries had every answer the same length, which reads as a form rather than as a set of questions somebody asked, and those were varied.
• The tool that applies these rewrites matches an answer by its exact question and refuses anything still under the floor, so an answer cannot be silently attached to the wrong question.

Changed

• Headings were rebuilt against a six-part contract: a heading has to work alone in a search result, so it carries a verb or a question word, names its subject, holds no number, and is one clause of three to nine words. Filing labels such as Overview and Background are gone. The catalogue now holds 1,311 distinct headings and none is used twice.
• Bold marks the claim the entry exists to make, capped at eight per cent of a body so that marking something still means something. Every entry links to its neighbours inside the sentences that are already about them, and every entry carries at least one list or quotation.
• Four entries turned out to have the same section written twice, from two passes that never met. The duplicates were merged, which made those entries shorter.

Fixed

• Small uppercase text in a light grey is the most common accessibility failure on a site that looks careful. The label colour is now a token with its own light and dark values instead of the muted body grey, and the share-card generator restates the same value, because that renderer cannot read the site's stylesheet and had been drifting from it.

Fixed

• The prompts described the picture as a museum plate and then listed the words it must not contain, which is an instruction to draw a plate with words on it. The framing was renamed, the list was replaced by a positive rule, and lettering is now allowed only where it genuinely belongs on an object in the scene.
• The accent colour is now a named share of the frame on a broad surface of one object, never a hairline and never on the background, which is why it could not be seen before. The illustrations are also explicitly present day: the old wording had been producing sepia and Victorian props.

Added

• The homepage has its own illustration, and the share card for the homepage now carries the same copy the page does rather than a block of statistics nobody reads in a preview.

Added

• Every entry states whether its term is named in a diagnostic manual, has clinical literature under that name, has only case reports or a historical record, or exists in dictionaries and word lists with no literature at all. Sorting those four apart is the reason the site exists: every other list online presents a studied phobia and an invented word in the same typeface.
• The site publishes without a byline, gives no diagnosis, no self-test and no treatment advice, and carries no advertising or affiliate placement. The method that stands in for an author is on the about page.