The English suffixes -phobia, -phobic, -phobe (from Greek φόβος phobos, "fear") occur in technical usage in psychiatry to construct words that describe irrational, abnormal, unwarranted, persistent, or disabling fear as a mental disorder (e.g., agoraphobia), in chemistry to describe chemical aversions (e.g., hydrophobic), in biology to describe organisms that dislike certain conditions (e.g., acidophobia), and in medicine to describe hypersensitivity to a stimulus, usually sensory (e.g., photophobia). In common usage, they also form words that describe dislike or hatred of a particular thing or subject (e.g., homophobia). The suffix is antonymic to -phil-.
For more information on the psychiatric side, including how psychiatry groups phobias such as agoraphobia, social phobia, or simple phobia, see phobia. The following lists include words ending in -phobia, and include fears that have acquired names. In some cases, the naming of phobias has become a word game, a notable example being a 1998 humorous article published by BBC News. In some cases, a word ending in -phobia may have an antonym with the suffix -phil-, e.g., Germanophobe/Germanophile.
