7 Real Phobias That Sound Made Up — Including the Fear of Long Words (Yes, It Has a Long Name)
The fear of beards. The fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. The fear of developing a phobia. All clinically documented.
Part of: Weird But True
Phobias get catalogued by clinicians, not by comedians — which is what makes some of them genuinely funny. Every one on this list is real, documented, and in the literature.
Nomophobia is the fear of being without a working mobile phone. It now appears in clinical literature with measurable symptoms: elevated heart rate, sweating, real anxiety. A study at Iowa State found a meaningful percentage of undergraduates qualify.
Pogonophobia is the fear of beards. Sufferers report distress in barbershops and at hipster cafés. There is no good 2020s self-help guide for this.
Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. The anxiety is not about peanut butter generally — only the sticking. It’s rare. It’s real. It’s in the DSM-adjacent literature.
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Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is, with no irony, the fear of long words. The name was almost certainly coined as a joke and then absorbed into use because the joke was too good not to keep.
Phobophobia is the fear of developing a phobia. It is the linguistic equivalent of standing between two mirrors and is, by all accounts, exhausting to live with.
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Sources
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Original editorial. Written by The Daily Stash Editors. See our editorial policy.