Word.ws English Dictionary

ocnophil

ocnophil noun: a personality type characterised by avoidance of dangerous of unfamiliar situations, and the reliance on other people for security.

Noun

ocnophil (plural ocnophils)

  1. A personality type characterised by avoidance of dangerous of unfamiliar situations, and the reliance on other people for security.
    • Coordinate term: philobat
    • People who need other people around them much of the time are people whose well-being depends massively on the feelings of others towards them. This alarms the philobats (the spacebats), but the ocnophils (the homebodies) like it that way.2018, Josephine Klein, Doubts and Certainties in the Practice of Psychotherapy

Forms of ocnophil

pluralocnophils

Origin of ocnophil

From Ancient Greek ὀκνέω (oknéō, “to shrink from, fear, hesitate”) + -o- + -phile with the final "e" dropped. Coined by Hungarian psychoanalyst Michael Balint in 1955.

Words formed from ocnophil

Questions about ocnophil

What does ocnophil mean?
Ocnophil means a personality type characterised by avoidance of dangerous of unfamiliar situations, and the reliance on other people for security.
What part of speech is ocnophil?
Ocnophil is a noun.
What is the plural of ocnophil?
The plural of ocnophil is ocnophils.

Words near ocnophil in the dictionary

  1. OCN
  2. Ocna Mureș
  3. Ocna Șugatag
  4. Ocnele Mari
  5. Ocnița
  6. ocnophil
  7. ocnophilic
  8. ocnophils
  9. OCNs
  10. OCO
  11. Ocoee

Source and license

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