Word.ws English Dictionary

gelotophobia

gelotophobia noun: an abnormal and persistent fear of being laughed at.

Noun

gelotophobia (uncountable)

  1. An abnormal and persistent fear of being laughed at.
    • Titze sees Gelotophobia as a clinical category, […]2008, Victor Raskin, The primer of humor research, page 54
    • Studies of gelotophobia. It turns out that gelotophobes have difficulty distinguishing between situations in which they are the butts of gentle mockery and those in which […]2011, Ted Gournelos, Viveca Greene, A Decade of Dark Humor, page 222

Origin of gelotophobia

Learned borrowing from Ancient Greek γέλως (gélōs, “laughter”) + -phobia.

Questions about gelotophobia

What does gelotophobia mean?
Gelotophobia means an abnormal and persistent fear of being laughed at.
What part of speech is gelotophobia?
Gelotophobia is a noun.

Words near gelotophobia in the dictionary

  1. gelotology
  2. gelotophile
  3. gelotophiles
  4. gelotophobe
  5. gelotophobes
  6. gelotophobia
  7. gelotophobic
  8. gelotophobics
  9. Gelphie
  10. Gelpi
  11. Gelpis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gelotophobia (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: “gelotophobia.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gelotophobia. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.