Collection · 12 entries
Words Nobody Has Ever Used
A phobia word can be perfectly formed, correctly derived, printed in a reference book, and still name nothing that has happened to anybody. The entries here are the clearest cases in the catalogue: terms that exist in dictionaries and word lists with no case report, no prevalence figure, no diagnostic listing, and in several instances no attested use outside the lists that carry them. The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias supplies most of them, often in three or four words, and the words travel from there to every phobia list on the internet, where they arrive looking exactly like arachnophobia.
The set is not an argument that nobody fears these things. Somebody somewhere is frightened of trees, of wasps, of returning home, and the fear is real to them. What is missing is the record, and the distinction between a fear and a record of a fear is the whole method of this catalogue. Each entry says how thin its own evidence is and where the word was found, which is the sentence every competing page refuses to write. Two of the members are worse than empty: anatidaephobia was invented as a cartoonist's joke and now has medical-information pages built on it, and aibohphobia was built backwards from its own suffix as a palindrome.
Hand-set, never alphabetical
The set, in order
12 entries
- Fear of DucksInvented by Gary Larson as a joke, and now carried by medical-information pages that did not check
- Fear of PalindromesAibohphobia is its own suffix reversed, which is the joke and also the whole of the record
- Fear of the Great Mole RatSix words in the encyclopedia, for an animal most of its readers could not identify
- Fear of TreesOne line in the printed reference, and nothing anywhere else
- Fear of RelativesSyngenesophobia gets four words, and the fear it names would be a large clinical problem if it existed
- Fear of ClocksThe correct form is chronometrophobia, and the form in circulation is a misspelling of it
- Fear of Open High PlacesTwo roots welded together to make a term no dictionary carries
- Fear of ShellfishOne line in the encyclopedia, and a food magazine using the word for a preference
- Fear of KneesOn Wiktionary's list of unattested phobias, which is the most honest place a phobia word can sit
- Fear of SlimeThree quotations were submitted to Wiktionary to keep the word, which is the entire literature
- Fear of HairDated to 1977, no case behind it, and what is documented is something else entirely
- Fear of FlutesThe encyclopedia's one account is that the sound resembles something else, which is a theory rather than a case
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.