The Phobia List

The Phobia List has hundreds (or thousands, I didn’t count them) of named phobias. If you are afraid of anything at all, it probably has a name here somewhere. Use the reverse list to find what you’re afraid of alphabetically, and it will tell you the name of your phobia. Buzzfeed illustrated some of the weirder ones.

The name for the fear of long words is just plain mean, don’t you think? And the fear of sitting down should have been named cat-here-o-phobia, or maybe spelled cat-hiss-o-phobia. See, the fear of sitting down can easily be initiated by the act of sitting on a cat.


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It looks like the phobia curing industry is on a down turn. While I found a site that offers cures for fears of garlic, poetry, and long words, the closest they have to deal with staring ducks is fear of being stared at with some ornithophobia. But if that duck happens to bring an otter friend, they have you covered. Even if he brings his great mole rat acquaintance, that is covered too.

There seems to be a lot of overlap between the list on the site you linked and the ones put into the templates there, so that might actually be the source they used. I can't find one of the other sites that used to exist like the one I was linking to that used the fear of ducks joke (only a bunch that look like broken English).

As much as some of these are real fears, I think too many of the names are not actually used in psychology, and are either the result of poetic wording in other situations, making up words to sound smart (like some of the names for groups of animals), or just padding for weird lists that predate the, "You'll never guess these 10 phobias people are actually scared of," type sites. Or some are repurposed from actual words, like ombrophobia from plants that don't like rain.
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Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia? I call bullshit. What we are seeing here is a list so padded with ad hoc constructs by some huckster with google translate.

Sesquipedalian (literally "foot and a half long-ish") is already a silly construct, but to say that "River Horse Monster Foot and a Half Longish Fear" makes any medical sense is ridiculous. Technical medical terms are meant to clarify, not obfuscate.

One is reminded of all those idiotic lists of animal lists claiming a "crash of rhinos" or a "mask of raccoons". The kind of crap written by a puddle of douche bags.
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What I found amusing, was as of a couple years ago, there were some websites advertising various services to help people with phobias, but they obviously used some sort of template/form letter system to have a separate page for each phobia:

"Are you finding yourself constantly afraid of X? Does your fear of X negatively impact your life? You may have a clinical case of chi-phobia, and our service can help you overcome your fear of X"

But the template must have been near completely unsupervised using whatever was the largest list they could find, as it included all sorts of joke phobias with the same dead serious pitch. "Does your fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth interfere with your performance at work?" "Does the fear somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you impact your romantic relationship?" "Did your fear of palindromes leave you traumatized as a child?"
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