The English language has many words that describe different kinds of prejudices. Some names for specific prejudices end in the suffix -phobia, such as: xenophobia (hatred or prejudice against foreigners), Islamophobia (hatred or prejudice against Muslims), homophobia (hatred or prejudice against gay and bisexual people), lesbophobia (hatred or prejudice against lesbians specifically), biphobia (hatred or prejudice against bisexual people specifically), and transphobia (hatred or prejudice against transgender people).
The suffix -phobia comes from a Greek root meaning “fear” and, in English, it is most commonly used in words that describe extreme, irrational, abnormal, or obsessive fears. As a result of this, often, when one person accuses another person of having a -phobia prejudice, the accused person will object to the term by making some variant of the assertion: “I can’t be [insert -phobia prejudice word here] because I’m not afraid of foreigners/Muslims/gay people/lesbians/bi people/trans people.”
This objection is, of course, invariably either extremely ignorant or disingenuous; words like xenophobia, et alii refer primarily to prejudices or hatreds and do not primarily indicate literal fears. This, however, raises the interesting question: Why does our language have so many words for prejudices that end in -phobia? To answer this question, I will explore the history of how the suffix -phobia entered into the English language and how the words with this suffix we know today arose. Surprisingly, the earliest attested English word with this suffix did not indicate a literal fear, but rather an aversion to water in patients with rabies.
The Greek word φόβος and its importation into English
The Greek word φόβος (phóbos), like many words in the Greek language, is first attested in the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are two epic poems in dactylic hexameter that most likely became fixed in something resembling their extant forms sometime around the early-to-mid seventh century BCE. In the Homeric epics, the word φόβος is exclusively used to refer specifically to the act of fleeing from battle in panic. In later Greek literature, however, it comes to have a more general meaning of fear, alarm, panic, awe, or even reverence.
The ancient Greeks sometimes used the suffix -φοβία (-phobía), derived from the word φόβος, to indicate an intense aversion to something. Ancient Greek medical writers, for instance, use the word ὑδροφοβία (hydrophobía), formed from ὑδρο- (hydro-) the combining form of the word ὕδωρ (hýdōr), meaning “water,” plus the suffix -φοβία, to refer to the intense aversion to water that is symptomatic of rabies. The Greek medical writer Pedanios Dioskourides (lived c. 40 – c. 90 CE) uses the word with this meaning in his treatise On Medical Material 2.47.
The word hydrophobia passed from Greek into Latin in antiquity. Eventually, it passed from Latin into English. According to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, the word is first attested in Middle English in 1392 in the form ydroforbia, but it is first attested in the standard modern spelling of hydrophobia in the sixteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) identifies hydrophobia as the model for all subsequently coined words in English that use the suffix -phobia.
According to the OED, over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, people coined a whole flurry of new words from Greek roots ending in the suffix -phobia to describe different kinds of fears, including pyrophobia (meaning “fear of fire,” first attested in 1858), agoraphobia (meaning “fear of wide open spaces” or “fear of crowds,” first attested in 1871), claustrophobia (meaning “fear of being trapped in a confined space,” first attested in 1879), gynophobia (meaning “fear of women,” first attested in 1886), and acrophobia (meaning “fear of heights,” first attested in 1888).
ABOVE: Illustration from the Vienna Dioskourides or Anikia Iouliana Codex, made in Constantinople in around 515 CE, folio 4 verso, depicting Heuresis, the personification of discovery, presenting a mandrake root to the physician Dioskourides
Xenophobia
It was in the midst of this whole craze of people eagerly coining new words for different fears from Greek roots using the suffix -phobia in the late nineteenth century that the earliest attested word in English that uses this suffix to describe a bigotry or prejudice first appears: xenophobia.
Like virtually all the other words people in the late nineteenth century were coining with the suffix -phobia, the word xenophobia is constructed purely from Greek roots and it has no English components. It is formed from the root xeno-, which comes from the Ancient Greek second-declension masculine noun ξένος (xénos), meaning “foreigner,” “stranger,” or “guest,” plus the suffix -phobia. The word therefore literally means “fear of or aversion to foreigners.”
Merriam-Webster states in this article they published on their website that the oldest instance of the word xenophobia that they have been able to find in writing occurs in an article for the 12 April 1880 issue of The Daily News, a center-left national U.K. daily broadsheet newspaper that was printed in London. The article reads:
“Here, however, as in other cases, we are inclined to think that intelligent xenomania is decidedly preferable to the Xenophobia which is of necessity and always unintelligent.”
Merriam-Webster says their earliest citation for the word xenophobe occurs in the 26 March 1891 issue for The Daily News:
“There is a wider field for satire in the behavior of Xenophobes, who wherever they wander say ‘for all we can see foreigners is “mostly fools.”’”
The word seems to have slowly caught on among the educated upper-classes in Britain. Merriam-Webster quotes another occurrence of the word xenophobe in the book The Pupils of Peter the Great: A History of the Russian Court and Empire from 1697 to 1740, written by the British historian Robert Nisbet Bain and first published in 1897:
“Zeikin seems to have been a faithful and conscientious teacher, for even such a fanatical Xenophobe as Theophylactus, Archbishop of Tver, allows that his intentions were at least honest, and his morals unexceptionable.”
Xenophobia seems to have set a model for subsequent words that use the suffix -phobia to indicate a specific kind of prejudice.
Judaeophobia
Hot on the heels of xenophobia came another word ending in the suffix -phobia that describes a specific prejudice. This word was not Islamophobia, homophobia, lesbophobia, biphobia, transphobia, or any of the other phrases that are commonly used today, but rather the lesser-known phrase Judaeophobia.
Hermann Adler (lived 1839 – 1911), the chief rabbi of the British Empire, appears to have coined the phrase Judaeophobia in a paper titled “The Recent Phases of Judaeophobia,” which he wrote as an impassioned defense of the Jewish people in direct response to a viciously antisemitic essay written by the British historian Goldwin Smith, a notorious racist, misogynist, and antisemite. Adler’s paper was published in December 1881 by Henry S. King & Co. in The Nineteenth Century, volume 10, pages 813–829.
Adler uses the term Judaeophobia in a quite literal sense to describe the sentiments of people who are afraid of Jewish people and their supposed influence in society. This term, however, never really seems to have caught on. Instead, the word antisemitism has generally become the standard word for hatred or prejudice against Jewish people.
ABOVE: Portrait photograph of Hermann Adler, who coined the phrase Judaeophobia, taken by H. S. Mendelssohn in around the year 1900
Islamophobia
The word Judaeophobia may have served as a model for the subsequent coining of the word Islamophobia, a form of which is first attested in writing around a decade later.
According to this article by Miloš Mrázek published in the Central European Journal of Contemporary Religion 2 (2017) 19–28, the word islamophobie first appears in two works published in the French language in 1910. One is an article by the French Africanist Maurice Delafosse titled “L’état actuel de l’islam dans l’Afrique occidentale française.” The other is a book by the French colonial bureaucrat Alain Quellien titled La politique musulmane dans l’Afrique Occidentale Française. Both authors wrote their works to criticize the French colonial authorities’ hostility toward and lack of understanding of Muslim people in French colonial territories.
The Oxford English Dictionary‘s earliest citation for the word in English is an article by Stanley Arthur Cook, the Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge, titled “The History of Religions,” published in 1923 in the Oxford University Press academic journal The Journal of Theological Studies 25. On page 101 of the article, Cook writes:
“Certain writers in particular are blamed for their ‘Islamophobia’.”
The word Islamophobia, however, did not enter widespread use until over seventy years after its first appearance in English.
The Palestinian American literary and cultural critic Edward Said (lived 1935 –2003) does not use the term Islamophobia in his landmark monograph Orientalism, published in 1978, which is widely credited with having laid the foundations for the field of postcolonial studies. He does, however, use the word one time in his paper “Orientalism Reconsidered,” originally published in autumn 1985 in the academic journal Cultural Critique (no. 1, pages 89-107), which can be accessed at this JSTOR link. On page 99 of that paper, Said writes:
“Or, take the connection – explicitly made by two of the authors I cite in Orientalism, Renan and Proust – between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Here, one would have expected many scholars and critics to have seen the conjuncture, that hostility to Islam in the modern Christian West has historically gone hand in hand with, has stemmed from the same source, has been nourished at the same stream as anti-Semitism, and that a critique of the orthodoxies, dogmas, and disciplinary procedures of Orientalism contribute to an enlargement of our understanding of the cultural mechanisms of anti-Semitism.”
Said’s use of the term may have influenced the left-wing British think tank Runnymede Trust, which is primarily responsible for popularizing the term Islamophobia through a series of publications in the 1990s, starting with a report titled A Very Light Sleeper: The Persistence and Dangers of Antisemitism, first published in 1994. In the report, on page 55, the Runnymede Trust draws the same connection that Said makes in “Orientalism Reconsidered” between antisemitism and “anti-Muslim feeling […] also sometimes known as Islamophobia.”
Three years later, in 1997, the Runnymede Trust published a report solely devoted to an analysis of prejudice against Muslims titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. The report defines the word Islamophobia on page one as “a useful shorthand way of referring to dread or hatred of Islam – and, therefore, to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims.” This report finally catapulted the word Islamophobia into widespread use in political discourse.
ABOVE: The French Africanist Maurice Delafosse, who was one of the first people to use the word islamophobie in writing in French in 1910 (left), and photograph from this article in The New Republic showing the Palestinian American literary and cultural critic Edward Said, who used the word Islamophobia one time in his paper “Orientalism Reconsidered” (right)
Homophobia
The words xenophobia and Islamophobia were both originally coined to describe prejudices against certain kinds of people and were never meant to describe phobias in the psychological sense of extreme or irrational fears. The word homophobia, however, has a slightly different history.
As I have mentioned in several previous articles, including this one from August 2021, for most of its history, mainstream Christianity has generally regarded sexual activity between persons of the same gender as sinful and depraved. In the nineteenth century, many educated westerners, especially psychologists and physicians, began to reclassify behaviors that Christianity had traditionally regarded as “sinful” as mental disorders.
The Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (lived 1840 – 1902) originally coined the word homosexuality in his book Psychopathia Sexualis, which he first published in 1886, as the name for a mental disorder. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the widely accepted medical consensus held that sexual attraction to persons of the same gender was a mental disorder that psychiatrists needed to cure people of.
In 1965, though, the American clinical psychologist George Weinberg (according to his 22 March 2017 obituary in The New York Times) was preparing to deliver a speech for the East Coast Homophile Organization (a very early pre-Stonewall gay rights organization). As he did so, he thought about a recent incident, in which he was inviting a friend who was a lesbian to a party and a group of his colleagues, upon finding out about her sexual orientation, told him to rescind her invitation.
Weinberg concluded that many straight people have not just a prejudice or disliking for same-gender-attracted people, but a literal phobia (as in an abnormal or irrational fear) of them. He therefore coined the term homophobia and used it in his speech, in which he excoriated the accepted medical consensus of the time.
Weinberg contended that same-gender-attracted people are completely healthy and normal and that it is actually mainstream straight society that has the mental disorder of homophobia. This was, if nothing else, a brilliant rhetorical ploy, which effectively sought to turn the medical establishment’s pathologizing of same-gender-attracted people on its head.
Weinberg was not alone in regarding prejudice against same-gender-attracted people as a kind of irrational fear or phobia; another clinical psychologist, Wainwright Churchill, uses the word homoerotophobia in his book Homosexual Behavior Among Males, published in 1967, to refer to the fear of same-gender sexuality that is pervasive in western culture.
The Oxford English Dictionary cites a passage in the 31 October 1969 issue of Time magazine as the earliest use of the word homophobia with its modern meaning in published writing:
“Such homophobia is based on understandable instincts among straight people, but it also involves innumerable misconceptions and oversimplifications.”
Weinberg finally used the word homophobia in published writing for the first time in his article “Words for the New Culture,” published in the weekly newspaper Gay in 1971. He used the word and discussed the concept extensively in his book Society and the Healthy Homosexual, published in 1972.
Both Weinberg and his book were influential in pushing for the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which eventually happened in 1973. Weinberg argues in an article he wrote in 2012 for The Huffington Post that, in the place of homosexuality, homophobia should formally be classified in the DSM as a mental disorder.
ABOVE: Photograph of the American clinical psychologist George Weinberg, who coined and popularized the term homophobia, from his obituary in The New York Times
Lesbophobia, biphobia, and transphobia
Over time, the meaning of the word homophobia became looser and it increasingly came to refer simply to prejudice and/or hatred against same-gender-attracted people in general, rather than specifically the fear of them. Soon, homophobia became the model for other words to describe prejudice against specific subsets of the LGBTQ+ community.
Lesbophobia seems to have been the first such term to follow on the heels of homophobia, coined to describe the specific intersectional combination of misogyny and homophobia that gay women face. The Oxford English Dictionary‘s earliest citation for the word lesbophobia is the book The Erotic Life of the American Wife: A Survey of Her Sexual Mores by Natalie Gittelson, published by Delacorte Press in 1972. On page 222, Gittelson writes:
“Many wives have become so self-conscious about the emerging Sapphic element in today’s society that one may discern a pernicious lesbophobia spreading from coast to coast.”
Biphobia seems to have come on the heels of lesbophobia, as bisexual people found that they faced prejudice not only from straight people for being same-gender-attracted, but also from gay people for supposedly being not gay enough. The Oxford English Dictionary‘s earliest citation for the word is an article published in the July–August 1982 edition of the bimonthly bisexual magazine Bi-monthly, published in San Francisco. The entry reads:
“I have put up with innumerable arguments about ‘when will bisexuals make up their minds’… So yes, biphobia is a real thing.”
The word transphobia seems to have come roughly a decade later; the Oxford English Dictionary‘s earliest citation for the word is an article published in the 22 July 1993 edition of the magazine U.S. News & World Report, published in Washington D.C. The article declares:
“She is also angry with the culture—a common target here—which she believes is suffering from a bad case of ‘transphobia’.”
Thus, by the turn of the twenty-first century, all of the words for prejudices ending in the suffix -phobia that are in widespread use today had been coined and popularized.
To me the fact that so many people dislike phobia being used to describe prejudice and bigotry instead of fear and anxiety does not indicate mass ignorance and disingenuousness but the fact that this usage is not as widely accepted as some believe, and also that words ending in -phobe have been weaponized into ideological epithets. It’s really important to make the distinction between people who are against something for completely irrational and/or hateful reasons and those who simply reach a different conclusion when presented the evidence. Take transgender athletes, for example. Can you know if someone is a transphobe just based on what side of the argument they are on? Of course not, but many people believe if you’re on the “wrong” side then you must be. In this case “transphobe” is just a stand-in for a Four Letter Word.
“irrational fear of” and “irrational hatred of” are two possible definitions of the suffix “-phobia,” but I suggest that “irrational aversion to” is more comprehensive and accurate. But maybe “irrational” is not a necessary condition for an aversion to be a phobia.
Here’s a personal experience that casts doubt on irrationality as a necessary component of phobias. When I was a small boy, some of the older boys in the school engaged in many forms of hatred and bullying, and for reasons only dimly surmised by me, chose me as one of their targets. A favorite taunt of theirs was “fag,” a new word for me at the time. I asked my mother what it meant, and she said, “Fairy.” I thought of Grimm and Andersen and wondered silently, “Where’s my wand?” A few years later, I learned that “fairy” had another meaning slightly less hate-filled than “fag”: a boy or man sexually attracted to other males. Long before puberty, boys discover their sexual orientation. I did at the movies, where during and shortly after World War Two, the sexiest actress was Betty Grable. I had a visceral reaction to her when I saw her on screen: I called her a “prick tickler.” I knew nothing of sex and its connection to erections, but like Ray Davies singing “Lola” I knew what I was. When eventually I learned what were euphemistically called “the facts of life” I felt an aversion to homosexuals that was misguided without being hateful. It was only well into adulthood that I overcame my homophobia, and now, even at age 85, I am not sure I am entirely rid of it. But for the last half century or so, I have viewed homosexuality and bisexuality as just other ways of being, neither better nor worse than heterosexuality. So although I would never consider a sexual relationship with another man, I learned say without venom “Sorry, no thanks” to homosexual propositions, love other men for who they are, and embrace lesbians with hugs just as I might with other women. No hatred, but is there still a twinge of irrationality? Or is it simply a natural and unavoidable reaction to having been taunted and bullied many decades ago?
I’ve reread your comment several times, Danny, and I’m still not sure what your question is, since you’re kind of rambling. It sounds to me like you may be saying that you were bullied and accused of being gay as a child and you still harbor some internalized prejudice against gay people, but you are trying to overcome that prejudice, and you are asking whether this is normal/ok.
If this is what you are asking, I would say that it is understandable for you to feel this way and I would say that it’s fine as long as you recognize it, continue trying to counteract your internalized prejudices, and (of course) politically support rights for queer people. (As a pointer, I would recommend that you, as a non-queer person, avoid using the f-slur. I’m not personally offended by you using it in this particular context, but some people would be.)
It sounds like you may also or instead be asking whether it is homophobic for you not to want to date men. If that is the case, I don’t know of anyone who would say that it is inherently homophobic or irrational for a man to not want to date other men if he’s simply not interested in men. Obviously, you should support rights for queer people, but it’s perfectly ok for you not to be gay yourself.
As a final comment, please don’t take this the wrong way, but I think that the story about your first erection in reaction to seeing Betty Grable is a bit too much information in this context. I realize that I shared some very personal information about myself in my previous post, so you may feel obliged to share similarly personal information about yourself here. In my previous post, though, I was very deliberate to only share information that I felt was constructive to my larger point about bathroom bills being harmful, whereas, here, I’m not entirely sure what larger point you’re trying to make by sharing such intimate details about your childhood.
I have no idea what he was talking about either but his comment and your reply genuinely made me laugh.
So I thought you might discuss why the –phobia construct seems more common but less accurate than the anti-ism. Maybe it’s something to do with changing from a sin/morality to a science/mental disorder framework, maybe you get further addressing someone’s “fears” than saying they’re hateful or maybe –phobia words are just easier to say and construct. Thanks for your always thoughtful articles
Basically, prejudice words ending in -phobia are emerging from two different contexts. The words xenophobia and Islamophobia come out of a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century context in which people were coining words using the suffix -phobia right and left, so the suffix probably seemed natural. The word homophobia comes out of a 1960s psychological context in which George Weinberg was basically trying to flip the script by saying that it’s not gay people who have a mental disorder, but rather straight people who have an irrational fear of gay people. All the other -phobia words relating to the LGBTQ+ community are modeled on homophobia.
It’s interesting how we adopt certain words for common usage even if the prefix or suffix doesn’t directly match the definition. For example, I’ve never heard anyone call someone a “gynophobe” for harboring prejudice towards women but “homophobe” is a normal and accepted word to describe people who hold prejudges towards gays. Must be another inconsistent quirk in the English language
Spencer, you may note that in current Greek the noun φοβία has in most cases a connotation of irrationality, while the adjective φοβικός directly implies psychological impairment.
Hello, dear Spencer
What a wonderful job yo’re doing here and in Quora!
People like you are very special. Keep walking!
Greetings from Brasil
Sandro
Thank you so much! I appreciate your positive feedback!
Hey Spence, is it true that the entire field of Egyptology was born out of Christians from Europe who tried to prove the exodus? Where are the sources for this? I thought the entire field of Egyptology began pretty much out of the Rosetta Stone. Just as a side note, I’m commenting on this article instead of the pharaoh of the exodus article because I think you locked the comments.
In the article you reference, which I posted over two years ago, I originally wrote: “the entire field of Egyptology was partly born out of a desire by Christian scholars from western Europe to prove that the Exodus really happened.”
I honestly can’t remember writing this sentence and I certainly can’t remember what I was thinking when I wrote it. In retrospect, I think that the statement was either an outright mistake or at the very least a very poor choice of wording. It certainly sounds inaccurate and hyperbolic to me now. I may have been thinking about how some of the earliest modern European travelers to visit Egypt and write about the ancient remains they saw there were devout Christians who were eager to identify all the monuments and ruins they saw as having some connection to the stories in the Bible (which is where, for instance, the notion that the pyramids were Jacob’s granaries comes from).
In any case, I have now revised the article to remove the statement you have pointed out here and replace it with a much more toned-down description.
Yeah thanks Spence! Yeah I just thought I’d bring it up because I had never heard that before and I wanted to know where you got that from so I was just curious.
Well, thank you for pointing that out! A lot of my articles that I wrote more than two years ago have mistakes and unfounded statements in them that I would not make today.