Fear of Palindromes

How the word builds itself

The construction is the whole of it. Take the suffix -phobia, reverse the spelling to get aiboh, and prefix it to itself. The result reads the same in both directions and means, by convention, a fear of things that read the same in both directions.

It is worth noting what the joke depends on. Almost every word in this catalogue is a Greek stem plus a suffix, chosen to describe an object, and the longest of them, hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, is a joke about the same machinery. Here there is no object and no stem: the word describes itself and is assembled from nothing but the machinery of the vocabulary it parodies. It is the only entry in the catalogue whose meaning could not exist before the naming convention did.

Where the joke came from

Wiktionary records that the word first appeared as an answer to National Challenge number 36, a competition run in a newspaper column by J Baxter Newgate, in which readers were asked to invent a phobia. The Orlando Sentinel of 22 October 1977 is given as the source, and the column did not name the entrant.

Wikipedia's list of phobias tells it differently. It files aibohphobia under jocular and fictional phobias and describes it as a piece of computer humour entered into The Devil's DP Dictionary in 1981.

Both accounts may be true, since a joke can be made twice, and neither names the person who made it. A word invented for a competition about inventing words has an origin story nobody kept, which is a small demonstration of how the rest of the list came to be.

Where the joke has been printed straight

The word escaped the joke:

• Science Digest carried a line in 1983 from someone describing themselves as unfortunate enough to be afflicted with it
• Richard Lederer used it in The Word Circus in 1997, hoping to have relieved any fear of palindromes the reader had harboured
• a 2004 book on football language advises anyone who suffers from it to skip the next few pages

New Scientist printed the best of them in February 2006, hoping not to provoke any attacks among its readers and reporting that the word means an abnormal and persistent fear of palindromes. That definition is the standard formula for a specific phobia, applied without visible irony to a word constructed as a pun, in a science magazine.

What a palindrome actually is

The English word palindrome was coined from the Greek palin, back, and dromos, way or direction, by Ben Jonson in the 1600s. The Greeks themselves had another phrase for it: karkinike epigraphe, crab inscription, or simply karkinioi, crabs, after the sideways and backward movement of the animal.

The catalogue keeps this entry for two reasons. Wikipedia's own list of phobias notes that phobia-naming has become a word game and cites a humorous BBC News article from 1998 as an example, so a list of phobias that omitted the jokes would be describing its subject inaccurately, and anatidaephobia is the other one this catalogue keeps. And the joke words are useful evidence: a reader who cannot tell aibohphobia from the serious-looking names beside it has understood something correct about the list.