Other forms: phobias
A phobia is an intense fear of one particular thing. A phobia of spiders, develop a phobia, a phobia about flying.
It is more than dislike: a clinical phobia is out of proportion to the danger, and the person usually knows it, which is what makes it distressing. Exposure therapy is the standard and effective treatment. The word is used loosely of ordinary dislikes, which annoys clinicians. Note the -phobia words, which run from arachnophobia to hundreds of coinages, most of them never used in practice.
1nounphobiaAn intense fear of one particular thing.
“He has a phobia of spiders and can't stay in a room with one.”
phobia is a fear.
Greek phobos means fear. The suffix -phobia was in English first, and phobia was cut out of those words as a noun in its own right in the eighteenth century.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰegʷ-
Ancient Greek
φόβος — fear
English, today
phobia
From -phobia. c, from words ending in -phobia, ultimately from Ancient Greek φόβος (“fear”). Compare ism, from -ism, itis, from -itis, and ana, from -ana.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA