The English suffixes -phobia, -phobic, -phobe (from Greek φόβος phobos, "fear") occur in technical usage in psychiatry to construct words that describe irrational, abnormal, unwarranted, persistent, or disabling fear as a mental disorder (e.g. agoraphobia), in chemistry to describe chemical aversions (e.g. hydrophobic), in biology to describe organisms that dislike certain conditions (e.g. acidophobia), and in medicine to describe hypersensitivity to a stimulus, usually sensory (e.g. photophobia). In common usage, they also form words that describe dislike or hatred of a particular thing or subject (e.g. homophobia). The suffix is antonymic to -phil-. For more information on the psychiatric side, including how psychiatry groups phobias such as agoraphobia, social phobia, or simple phobia, see phobia. The following lists include words ending in -phobia, and include fears that have acquired names. In some cases, the naming of phobias has become a word game, of notable example being a 1998 humorous article published by BBC News. In some cases, a word ending in -phobia may have an antonym with the suffix -phil-, e.g. Germanophobe/Germanophile. Many -phobia lists circulate on the Internet, with words collected from indiscriminate sources, often copying each other. Also, a number of psychiatric websites exist that at the first glance cover a huge number of phobias, but in fact use a standard text to fit any phobia and reuse it for all unusual phobias by merely changing the name. Sometimes it leads to bizarre results, such as suggestions to cure "prostitute phobia".
The word comes from the name of the family Anatidae, and was used in Gary Larsons The Far Side. Anoraknophobia – a portmanteau of "anorak" and "arachnophobia". It was used in the Wallace and Gromit comic book Anoraknophobia. Also the title of an album by Marillion. Arachibutyrophobia – fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth, from Latin arachis "peanut" and butyrum "butter". The word is used by Charles M. Schulz in a 1982 installment of his Peanuts comic strip, and by Peter ODonnell in his 1985 Modesty Blaise adventure novel Dead Mans Handle. Charlophobia – the fictional fear of any person named Charlotte or Charlie, mentioned in the comedic book A Duck is Watching Me: Strange and Unusual Phobias (2014), by Bernie Hobbs. The phobia was created to mock name bias, a form of discrimination studied by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia – fear of long words, from the root word sesquipedalophobia combined with monstrum and hippopotamus. This was mentioned on the first episode of Brainiac Series Five as a Tickles Teaser. Keanuphobia – fear of Keanu Reeves, portrayed in the Dean Koontz book, False Memory, where a woman has an irrational fear of Reeves and has to see her psychiatrist, Mark Ahriman, each week, unaware that she only has the fear in the first place because Ahriman implanted it via hypnotic suggestion to amuse himself. He calls her "Keanuphobe" in his head.