Fear of the Great Mole Rat

What the definition amounts to

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias gives it as fear of the great mole rat, with no case, no figure and no history, and moves straight on to its entry on Zen. Wiktionary marks it rare and defines it identically.

The complication arrives in Wiktionary's usage note. The quotations all define zemmiphobia as the fear of the great mole rat, but great mole rat is not a widely recognised common name for any animal. The word most likely refers to the greater blind mole-rat.

The uncertainty is old and was noticed early. A question posted to Wiktionary's discussion page on 20 February 2006 asked whether the word was real at all, and what a great mole rat was anyway. The answer given was that it is real, and that a great mole rat is a mole rat that is not naked but is great, of the family called blesmols, and that it looks like a normal mole rat except bigger.

Why every recorded use is a joke

The collected quotations are unusually consistent, and there are four of them:

• a 2003 book of advice about horses, quoted below
• Carol Clewlow's alphabet for spinsters, 2005
• a children's novel of 2011
• a book about laughter, 2013

A 2003 book of advice about horses says the author finds it difficult to imagine how she might one day employ zemmiphobia, the fear of the great mole rat, in a training regimen, and calls that her own personal failure.

Carol Clewlow's alphabet for spinsters, published in 2005, has a character listing fears from arachnophobia to zemmiphobia, then stopping to ask what zemmiphobia even is. A children's novel of 2011 promises that the book does not deal in any way with zemmiphobia, adds a parenthesis suggesting the reader show the word to a teacher so she can pronounce it, and concedes that most readers will agree great mole rats are pretty freaky. A book about laughter, from 2013, lists it alongside a fear of string.

In all four the word is doing the same job. It marks the far end of a list, the point where naming fears in Greek stops being useful and becomes funny, which is the job aibohphobia does at the other end, and every author who quotes it is making that observation rather than describing anybody.

Why this word rather than another

Two properties made it the standard example. It begins with the last letter of the alphabet, so it terminates any list of phobias arranged the usual way, and Clewlow's arachnophobia to zemmiphobia is exactly that construction.

The other is the specificity. Most rare phobia words name a broad category, and this one names a single animal that most readers cannot picture, that has no consistent common name, and that lives underground where nobody would encounter it. A fear of rats is ordinary. A fear of one particular kind of rat, identified by a name zoologists do not use, is the shape of a joke.

The word survives on that quality alone. No clinical literature exists, no diagnostic manual carries it, and there is no recorded case of anybody afraid of the animal in question.