Aelurophobia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A psychological disorder manifests as an intense fear of cats, resulting in severe anxiety and an overwhelming desire to avoid all feline encounters
2. Characterized by an excessive and irrational dread of domestic cats, this phobia leads individuals to experience significant distress in their presence
3. A specific phobia that involves an extreme and irrational fear of cats, causing distress and often avoidance of situations where felines may be encountered

Etymology: In 1905 the Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, better known for prescribing the "rest cure", took up a strange claim. Some people, it was said, could sense a cat in a room without seeing or hearing it. His paper bore the title "Of Ailurophobia and the Power to Be Conscious of the Cat as Near, When Unseen and Unheard", and it is among the earliest known appearances of the word. It was probably coined around then, and Mitchell certainly gave it a public airing. No ancient Greek ever spoke of "ailourophobia". It is a modern medical coinage, built like dozens of its siblings from old Greek parts. The first part is "ailouros", the Greek word for cat. Herodotus used it in the fifth century BC when he described the Egyptians, who held cats sacred and shaved their eyebrows in mourning when a household cat died. The domestic cat was still something of a novelty in Greece then. The Greeks had long relied on the "galē", a weasel or polecat, to keep down mice. Where "ailouros" itself came from is uncertain. An old explanation splits it into "aiolos", meaning quick or shifting, and "oura", tail: the animal with the restless, waving tail. It is a lovely picture and fits any cat ever watched stalking a bird. Many scholars, though, suspect it was invented to explain a word whose real origin had been forgotten. The second part is "phobos", which in Homer meant panicked flight before it meant fear. Through words like "hydrophobia", it became the standard suffix for naming morbid fears. The spelling "aelurophobia" simply renders the Greek "ai" in the Latin manner, as in "aesthetic". "Ailurophobia" remains the more common form. The same Greek cat turns up somewhere unexpected. When the French zoologist Frédéric Cuvier named the red panda in 1825, he called its genus "Ailurus". So the scientific name of a russet tree-climber from the Himalayas, which is no cat at all, simply means "cat".