Word.ws English Dictionary

chelonaphobia

chelonaphobia noun: the fear of turtles (including tortoises).

Noun

chelonaphobia (uncountable)

  1. (rare) The fear of turtles (including tortoises).
    • An aquarium, however, is a dangerous place to fall out with your husband if you have chelonaphobia. My wife, I must tell you, is scared – not just scared, terrified more like – of all tortoises and all creatures that look like tortoises including turtles. […] Freelancing on travel technology...2011, Ben Hatch, chapter 6, in Are We Nearly There Yet? A Family’s 8,000-Mile Car Journey Around Britain, Chichester, West Sussex: Summersdale Publishers Ltd, →ISBN, pages 52–53
    • I knew everything about Moxie, from her shoe size — six — to the fact that she suffered from chelonaphobia, or a fear of turtles. We’d discovered that together during a disastrous fifth-grade class trip to a small zoo called Reptiland.2017, Bethany Blake, chapter 36, in Death by Chocolate Lab (Lucky Paws Petsitting Mystery), Waterville, Me.: Thorndike Press Large Print, Gale, →ISBN, page 227

Examples of chelonaphobia in a sentence

  • An aquarium, however, is a dangerous place to fall out with your husband if you have chelonaphobia.2011, Ben Hatch, chapter 6, in Are We Nearly There Yet? A Family’s 8,000-Mile Car Journey Around Britain, Chichester, West Sussex...
  • They don’t attack you, so there’s not a fear of turtles.” Not for Yee, maybe, but chelonaphobia does exist—there are people who are afraid of turtles.2018, Peter Laufer, “Ninja Turtles Fuel Crisis”, in “The Prodigious Farms”, in Dreaming in Turtle: A Journey Through the Passion, Profit...
  • Unfortunately, it was nailed above and partially over the volunteer sheet “tURtle bAiT nEedeD, sEriOUs vOLunTeeRs onLy; abSencE oF chELonaPHobiA is A pLuS!2023, John Laible, “February Year 869: Phobia”, in The Gnome, the Dwarf, and the Danger Tree (The Saga of Brip and Torvir; 1), →ISBN:

Origin of chelonaphobia

From Ancient Greek χελώνη (khelṓnē) + -phobia.

Questions about chelonaphobia

What does chelonaphobia mean?
Chelonaphobia means the fear of turtles (including tortoises).
How do you use chelonaphobia in a sentence?
An aquarium, however, is a dangerous place to fall out with your husband if you have chelonaphobia.
What part of speech is chelonaphobia?
Chelonaphobia is a noun.

Words near chelonaphobia in the dictionary

  1. chelodid
  2. chelodids
  3. cheloid
  4. cheloidal
  5. cheloids
  6. chelonaphobia
  7. chelone
  8. chelones
  9. chelonian
  10. chelonians
  11. chelonid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chelonaphobia (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “chelonaphobia.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chelonaphobia. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.