Fear of Certain Places
Topophobia
Topophobia is a fear of certain places, and the Oxford English Dictionary's only evidence for it in the medical sense is a single entry in a lexicon published in 1899. The word is not obsolete, though. It moved to a different discipline.
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What the dictionary evidence amounts to
The OED has one meaning for topophobia and one piece of evidence for it, from 1899, in the New Sydenham Society Lexicon. The entry is marked as not yet fully revised. Its frequency table runs from the 1890s to the 2010s and never leaves the band between 0.0011 and 0.0018 occurrences per million words, which the dictionary rounds to fewer than 0.01. A word can hardly be flatter than that: it has been rare for a hundred and twenty years and has not become rarer.
The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias defines it as fear of certain places and connects it to the fear of cemeteries and, indirectly, to the fear of death. That is the whole psychiatric account. No case, no prevalence, no treatment.
How geography put topophobia to work
Topophilia, love of place, is the established term in humanistic geography, and topophobia is its negative counterpart. In that field the word is current and it is measured.
Zana Bayley and Lucia Crowther published a study in Health and Place in November 2024 on hospice topophilia and topophobia, interviewing 53 people in the catchment population of an English hospice. Their finding is that the hospice setting is perceived with love and fear at once, and that the coexistence of the two has consequences for who reaches hospice care and who does not. The paper's argument is about access, and the fear of a place is treated as a measurable barrier rather than as a symptom.
A second paper, published in Moravian Geographical Reports in July 2024, mapped the two perceptions using a mobile application in Olomouc in the Czech Republic and Brisbane in Australia, collecting 634 momentary assessments in the first city and 318 in the second. Its motivation was that asking people to recall how a place felt introduces recall bias and loses detail, and that perceptions of a place change with the time of day. It reports being able to identify hotspots and, its own term, hot times.
What the only survey figure shows
Wiktionary's only citation is from the proceedings of the Environmental Design Research Association conference in 1997: of 113 people who answered questionnaires, 25 showed some degree of topophobia. That is a fifth of the sample, and it comes from a design conference rather than a clinic, which places even this figure on the geography side of the split.
Which meaning a reader ends up with
The two senses are not in conflict so much as unaware of each other:
- one names an individual's phobic avoidance of specific locations, the territory Agoraphobia already covers, and rests on a lexicon entry from 1899
- the other names a population's negative feeling about a place, and is being measured with mobile applications in 2024 They share a word, a root and nothing else.
For a catalogue of fears the honest position is that the psychiatric term has no evidence behind it and the geographical one is not a phobia. A person avoiding one building because of what happened in it would be assessed as having a specific phobia, or post-traumatic stress, and the word topophobia would not appear in the notes.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of Certain Places
- AgoraphobiaAgoraphobia is about the difficulty of leaving a place rather than the identity of the place. Topophobia as defined attaches to a particular location, which agoraphobia does not.
- Fear of Death and Dead BodiesThe 2008 encyclopedia routes topophobia to the fear of cemeteries and from there indirectly to the fear of death, which is the only mechanism it proposes for the term.
- Fear of Home SurroundingsOikophobia names an aversion to one specific place, the home, and is the closest thing in the catalogue to a worked example of what topophobia describes in general.
Common questions
Questions about Topophobia
- How rare is the word?
- The Oxford English Dictionary measures it at fewer than 0.01 occurrences per million words and has one supporting quotation, from the New Sydenham Society Lexicon of 1899. Its frequency band has stayed between 0.0011 and 0.0018 per million from the 1890s to the 2010s, which is as close to a flat line as a word gets.
- Why do geographers use it?
- As the opposite of topophilia, love of place, which is an established term in humanistic geography. A study in Health and Place in 2024 used both to describe how 53 people in an English hospice catchment feel about the hospice, and found love and fear coexisting in the same population with consequences for who accesses care.
- Has anyone measured it?
- Only outside the clinic. A 1997 environmental design conference paper reported that 25 of 113 questionnaire respondents showed some degree of topophobia, and a 2024 project mapped topophobic perceptions in Olomouc and Brisbane through 952 momentary assessments made on a mobile application. Neither is a prevalence figure for a phobia.
- Would a clinician use the word?
- Almost certainly not. Somebody who avoids one building because of what happened there would be assessed as having a specific phobia or post-traumatic stress, and the notes would name the place.
Added 2026-08-23 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.