Fear of Clocks

Why the common spelling is a mistake

There are two spellings. The rarer one, chronometrophobia, comes cleanly from the Ancient Greek khronos, time, and metron, measure, which are the same two roots that give chronometer, a device for measuring time. That form needs no explaining.

The common one has an n in it. Phobia lists account for that by deriving the middle of the word from the Latin -mentum, a means or an instrument. Wiktionary points out the problem with that: -mentum does not explain the r. The Latin derivation was assembled to license a spelling rather than the other way round, and the entry concludes that the form likely originated as a misspelling.

So the standard name for this fear is a typing error with a false etymology attached, and the false etymology is what appears on the pages that carry the word.

Where the word actually appears in print

Emily Rodda used it in Dirty Tricks, a Raven Hill Mysteries book for children published in 1996, and misspelled it a third way. A character threatens that if the others keep hassling Richelle about being late she will develop chronomeatrophobia, fear of clocks, to go with her rhytiphobia, fear of getting wrinkles. The joke is that the boy has been waiting to be asked.

Stephen Cannell's crime novel Hollywood Tough, published in 2003, gives it to an actor who uses it to avoid schedules, telling a director that having someone who understands his chronomentrophobia helps him on set because nobody runs around yelling about the schedule. Ten minutes later the same man says they are on a tight clock and had better get going. The book calls it a comedy-killing ailment.

The remaining citations are newspaper trivia questions. A Montana paper asked in 2004 whether a sufferer would be afraid of clocks, calendars, crows or cheese. Another asked the same thing in 2012.

A children's book, a novel about a man faking it, and two quiz answers is the entire documented use.

What the health pages describe

The consumer health pages that carry the term describe distress at the appearance and the sounds of clocks, and specify the parts:

• the ticking and the chiming
• the digits on the face
• the mechanics and gears inside Symptoms are said to run from unease to panic attacks.

They then extend it well past the object, to deadlines, schedules, punctuality and the fear of approaching death. That last extension is the giveaway. A fear of death and a fear of a ticking sound are different problems, and the only thing joining them is that a clock happens to represent both.

The catalogue keeps the two apart. Chronophobia, the fear of time itself, has a clinical description and a population, the prisoners in whom it was first documented. This word names the object on the wall.