fungophile
fungophile is the alternative form of fungiphile.
Meaning of fungiphile
Noun
fungiphile (plural fungiphiles)
- A person who likes to collect, cook or eat wild mushrooms.
- In addition to the enjoyment of hunting and the pleasure of new mushroom discoveries, the cryptic association of fungi with the decaying dead lends to the search a certain mystique that inspires the avid fungiphile.1999, Jack S. States, Mushrooms and Truffles of the Southwest, page 11
- Synonyms:
- mycophile
- Any organism (typically a bacterium) that selectively inhabits a fungus.
Forms of fungophile
| plural | fungophiles |
|---|
Origin of fungophile
Synchronically, by surface analysis, as if putative *fungo- + -phile, in morphologic parallel with fungiphile as fungi- + -phile; *fungo- is nonstandard, but a putative assertion of it is predictable as something that will periodically arise naturally among speakers by apparent analogy with how hundreds of other ISV combining forms containing o are formed (compare -o-, and compare also lexophile); diachronically, the word fungophile has been independently re-created (and googled) many times by individual speakers and writers, some of whom have used it in capitalized proper noun form to name their own mycophilic endeavors (e.g., as a screenname, website title, or otherwise); but its common noun sense is now incontrovertibly attested many times over, albeit informal and nonstandard.
Questions about fungophile
- What is fungophile the alternative form of?
- Fungophile is the alternative form of fungiphile.
Words near fungophile in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: fungophile (page history and authors); fungiphile (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: “fungophile.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fungophile. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.