Word.ws English Dictionary

phobiaphobia

phobiaphobia noun: the fear of fear itself.

Noun

phobiaphobia (uncountable)

  1. The fear of fear itself.
    • A lot of fears have already been named for us; such as acrophobia (fear of high places), agoraphobia (fear of open places), zoophobia (fear of animals), phobiaphobia (fear of fear), etc. You need not, however, be limited to those already named and catalogued.Bill L. Little, Self-Destruction Made Easy (page 72)
    • When unchecked, fear spawns a whole brood of phobias—fear of water, high places, closed rooms, darkness, loneliness, among others—and such an accumulation culminates in phobiaphobia or the fear of fear itself.2012, Martin Luther King Jr., A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings, page 116
    Synonyms:
    phobophobia

Synonyms of phobiaphobia

Origin of phobiaphobia

From phobia + -phobia.

Questions about phobiaphobia

What does phobiaphobia mean?
Phobiaphobia means the fear of fear itself.
What part of speech is phobiaphobia?
Phobiaphobia is a noun.

Words near phobiaphobia in the dictionary

  1. phobiac
  2. phobiacs
  3. phobiae
  4. phobian
  5. phobians
  6. phobiaphobia
  7. phobias
  8. phobic
  9. phobic avoidant
  10. phobically
  11. phobics

Source and license

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