Why is there a separate word from oikophobia?

Because oikophobia was taken. It has been used for wanderlust since 1808, for a loathing of housework in postwar West Germany, and since the 1990s for the repudiation of one's own culture. The note in the reference material says that if psychiatry did use it, it would mean a fear of items inside a house rather than of the house, and that the fear of the house itself is domatophobia.

No. It has one line in the 2008 encyclopedia of phobias and a single collected quotation, with no case material behind either, and no diagnostic manual carries the term.

What did Scruton mean by oikophobia?

The repudiation of inheritance and home. He first used the word at Boston University in 1993 and expanded it in his 2004 book England and the Need for Nations, treating it as a normal stage of the adolescent mind and also as a feature of political impulses that prefer foreign cultures, which he cast as the antithesis of xenophobia.

What would the fear actually consist of?

The one published description makes the point by inversion: four walls, three meals and a bed are what most people mean by security, and in this fear those same necessities are the basis of the phobia. The retreat that manages most fears is the thing feared.

Fear of Houses (Domatophobia): Meaning, Causes & Symptoms

Fear of Houses

Domatophobia

Domatophobia is the fear of being in a house, and it exists mainly to mark the boundary of a more famous word that does not mean that at all. The literal sense had to be given its own term because the obvious one was already taken.

What the domatophobia entry says

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias records domatophobia as fear of being in a house, and sends the reader to its own entry under house. That is all it says.

Wiktionary carries a single quotation, from a 2010 book of medical questions and answers, which puts the difficulty plainly: for most people the basic idea of security is having four walls, three meals a day and a bed to sleep on, and for somebody with domatophobia those same necessities are the basis of the phobia.

That is the whole recorded literature. What makes the word worth an entry is not its own history but the vacancy it fills.

Why oikophobia could not take the literal sense

Oikophobia is built from oikos, the Greek for house or household, and it has never settled on the literal reading. It is not used in psychiatry and is not listed in the current diagnostic manual. If it were, the note attached to it says, it would narrowly indicate a fear of specific items contained in a house, such as appliances, bathtubs and electric switches, and not the fear of a house itself, which is domatophobia.

Every other use of oikophobia has drifted further. The Romantic poet Robert Southey used it in 1808 for a desire, particularly among the English, to leave home and travel, which makes his sense a synonym for wanderlust. In West Germany after the Second World War some commentators applied it to a fear and loathing of housework among women who worked outside the home and were drawn to a consumerist life.

The political sense is the loudest. Roger Scruton first wrote of oikophobia while at Boston University in 1993, and in his book England and the Need for Nations, published in 2004, expanded it to mean the repudiation of inheritance and home. He treated it as a stage the adolescent mind normally passes through, and also as a feature of certain political impulses that prefer foreign cultures to their own, which he presented as the exact antithesis of Xenophobia.

The senses it does carry do not sit together:

wanderlust
distaste for housework
cultural self-rejection
a specific phobia of household objects

A word cannot hold all four at once. Domatophobia is what remains once the others have taken their share.

What the literal fear would involve

The distinction the sources draw is between the container and its contents. A fear of appliances, bathtubs and electric switches is a fear of several objects that happen to share an address. A fear of being in a house is a fear of the enclosure itself, and it has no obvious substitute, since the alternative to a house is exposure.

That is the point the 2010 quotation reaches for: a phobia of the four walls attacks the same structure that most fears are managed by retreating into. The reference books offer no case, no figure and no history to test it against.

The related coinage ecophobia sits nearby, built from the same Greek root by a different route. None of the three terms has produced clinical literature, and only one of them, the one nobody uses literally, has produced a political argument.

Common questions

Questions about Domatophobia

Why is there a separate word from oikophobia?: Because oikophobia was taken. It has been used for wanderlust since 1808, for a loathing of housework in postwar West Germany, and since the 1990s for the repudiation of one's own culture. The note in the reference material says that if psychiatry did use it, it would mean a fear of items inside a house rather than of the house, and that the fear of the house itself is domatophobia.
Is it a diagnosis?: No. It has one line in the 2008 encyclopedia of phobias and a single collected quotation, with no case material behind either, and no diagnostic manual carries the term.
What did Scruton mean by oikophobia?: The repudiation of inheritance and home. He first used the word at Boston University in 1993 and expanded it in his 2004 book England and the Need for Nations, treating it as a normal stage of the adolescent mind and also as a feature of political impulses that prefer foreign cultures, which he cast as the antithesis of xenophobia.
What would the fear actually consist of?: The one published description makes the point by inversion: four walls, three meals and a bed are what most people mean by security, and in this fear those same necessities are the basis of the phobia. The retreat that manages most fears is the thing feared.

Added 2026-08-24 · Revised 2026-08-26