Aibohphobia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An irrational dread of palindromes, the words or phrases that read the same forwards and backwards
2. A persistent, unreasonable fear of palindromic words, numbers, or sentences that look the same in both directions
3. The unusual phobia of encountering palindromes, which can provoke anxiety in those who find them unsettling

Etymology: Anyone who truly suffered from a fear of palindromes would be unable to say the name of their own condition without meeting the thing they dread. That is the joke, and it is built into every letter. Take "phobia," spell it backwards as "aibohp," and run the two together so they share the "p" in the middle: a-i-b-o-h-p-h-o-b-i-a reads the same in either direction. No doctor named it, no patient ever had it, and the occasional claim that it is a recognized clinical phobia gets the story backwards. It was invented as a game. The game was a newspaper contest. On October 22, 1977, the Orlando Sentinel ran a column by J. Baxter Newgate whose "National Challenge #36" asked readers to make up a phobia. Among the answers printed was this self-mocking word, but the column did not name the reader who sent it. A much later report on the Usenet puzzle forum rec.puzzles credited one Rich Seidner, but the original printing left its inventor anonymous. From there it traveled the way wordplay travels, passed between collectors of verbal oddities. It turned up in Stan Kelly-Bootle's "The Devil's DP Dictionary" of 1981, a satirical lexicon of computing in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce, appeared in a 1991 compendium of palindromes, and was in Richard Lederer's "The Word Circus" by 1997. It stays a nonce word, a coinage made for one occasion, kept alive because people enjoy repeating it. The words behind the joke are both Greek, though they came to English separately. "Phobia" goes back to "phobos," which could mean fear itself or the thing that causes it, and which in its earliest sense carried the idea of panic and headlong flight; Phobos was the god who embodied that terror. "Palindrome," the name for what the word does rather than a piece of it, comes from "palindromos," "running back again," made from "palin," "again, back," and "dromos," "a running, a course." It has been the English name for words and lines that read the same both ways since the seventeenth century. The Greeks had played the game long before. A Byzantine inscription found on baptismal fonts, often attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus, reads the same backwards in Greek: "Nipson anomēmata mē monan opsin," "Wash your sins, not only your face." Many centuries later, a newspaper reader turned the same trick on fear itself, coining a word that its supposed sufferers would have every reason to dread.

Synonyms: palindromophobia