Collection · 10 entries
Internet-Coined Phobias
Almost every word in this catalogue was made by a clinician, a lexicographer or a classicist and then reached the public. These went the other way. Each was posted, printed in a student magazine or attached to a press release, repeated until it looked established, and only later picked up by anybody with a reason to check. Trypophobia is the clearest case: an anonymous poster coined it in 2005, it circulated for eight years before a scientist used it in print, and it now carries a real experimental literature that exists because the word did first.
That order matters. The usual sequence is observation, then description, then a name. Here the name arrives first and the observation is organised around it afterwards, which means the word does some of the work a finding is supposed to do. The set includes its counter-examples deliberately. Misophonia went from audiologists to the internet rather than the reverse. Nomophobia was coined twice, the first time in 1803 for something else entirely. FOMO arrived in a Harvard Business School student magazine with a companion term nobody kept. Two of these are barely five years old and already carry survey data, which is faster than any clinical term here managed. The order is the date of the coinage rather than the date of the research, because that ordering is the argument.
Hand-set, never alphabetical
The set, in order
10 entries
- Fear of the Number 13The superstition is ancient and the word is barely older than the web, which is the pattern in its purest form
- MisophoniaThe inverse case: coined by audiologists in 2001 and adopted by the internet afterwards
- Fear of Missing OutCoined in a Harvard Business School student magazine in 2004, alongside a second term nobody kept
- TrypophobiaPosted in 2005, in print by 2013, and the only one of these with a literature behind it
- Fear of Being Without a PhoneCoined twice: an 1803 aversion to laws, then a 2008 survey that reused the letters for something new
- Fear of GhostsOlder than the internet by centuries, but the word itself is barely older than the web
- Fear of Submerged Man-Made ObjectsA coinage with no case literature at all, and sufferers who report no triggering event to explain it
- Health Anxiety From Online SearchingNamed for the medium that produces it, which no earlier phobia term had to do
- DoomscrollingA 2020 word for a behaviour described in the 1970s under a different name and without a screen
- Zoom FatigueNamed after one product, arriving with a measurable event behind it rather than a coinage story
Keep going
The other collections
- Words That Are Not PhobiasPhotophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, chromophobia. Where the suffix does scientific, political or sociological work instead of naming a fear.
- Medical and Dental FearsThe fears whose avoidance is itself the danger. Needles, dentists, doctors, hospitals and scans, and what avoiding each one costs the person avoiding it.
- Most Common PhobiasSpiders, heights, flying, the dentist, public speaking: the phobias most often called common, each with the prevalence figure the claim rests on.
- One Word, Two Different FearsAerophobia, phonophobia, basophobia: terms carrying two unrelated senses, with the collision traced and the usable meaning named.