The
English suffixes
-phobia,
-phobic,
-phobe (from
Greek φόβος
phobos, "fear") occur in technical usage in
psychiatry to construct words that describe irrational,
abnormal, unwarranted, persistent, or disabling
fear as a mental disorder (e.g.
agoraphobia), in
chemistry to describe chemical aversions (e.g.
hydrophobic), in
biology to describe organisms that dislike certain conditions (e.g.
acidophobia), and in
medicine to describe hypersensitivity to a stimulus, usually sensory (e.g.
photophobia). In common usage, they also form words that describe dislike or hatred of a particular thing or subject. The suffix is
antonymic to
-phil-.