Phobia Trivia
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This phobia trivia quiz has 99 free questions with answers and covers the fears people actually have and the strange names psychologists and internet forums have given them: spiders, heights, clowns, needles, the number 13, being without your phone, and the famously long word for the fear of long words. Alongside the vocabulary you will find the science: how the DSM classifies specific phobias, why blood phobia makes people faint when other fears do not, the Little Albert experiment, exposure therapy, and the god Phobos who gave fear its name. It works for a Halloween quiz, a psychology classroom warm-up or a pub round where everyone thinks they know what claustrophobia means. Questions run from easy household words to expert-level etymology. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries and clinical sources before publishing.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Arachnophobia is the fear of which creatures?
Spiders
Spiders can set off arachnophobia through nothing more than a web or a photograph, yet the dread far outruns the danger: most arachnids pose little threat to people.
Q 02Acrophobia is the fear of what?
Heights
Heights unsettle us from infancy: in the classic 'visual cliff' experiment, most crawling babies refused to cross a sheet of glass laid over an apparent drop.
Q 03Coulrophobia is the fear of what?
Clowns
Clowns unsettle people, researchers suggest, because the make-up hides the real face and distorts its expressions, so nobody can tell what is going on underneath.
Q 04The 'coulro-' in coulrophobia comes from a Greek word meaning what?
Stilt-walker
Ancient Greek had no clowns as such, so the coiners borrowed kolobathristes; Oxford Dictionaries only added the word in 2010.
Q 05Someone with claustrophobia fears what?
Confined spaces
Confined spaces such as lifts, tunnels and windowless rooms are the classic triggers, and steering clear of them backfires: avoidance tends to reinforce the fear.
Q 06Agoraphobia takes its name from the Greek word for what?
The marketplace
The marketplace, or agora, was the open heart of a Greek city; Berlin psychiatrist Carl Westphal borrowed the word in 1871 for three patients seized by dread in the city's public places.
Q 07Which condition is described by the word glossophobia?
Dread of public speaking
Dread of public speaking takes its name from glossa, Greek for tongue; the body can read an audience as a threat and fire its fight-or-flight response, flooding the speaker with adrenaline.
Q 08Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of which number?
Thirteen
Thirteen owes its bad name partly to the Last Supper, where tradition seats thirteen at the table with Judas among them, and the unease lingers: some hotels still have no 13th floor.
Q 09Tetraphobia, common in East Asia, is the fear of which number?
Four
In several East Asian languages the word for four sounds like the word for death.
Q 10Trypophobia is an aversion to what?
Clusters of small holes
Clusters of small holes, as in a honeycomb or a lotus pod, may repel us for a reason: one theory holds that the brain links such patterns with danger, because several venomous animals carry similar markings.
Q 11Nomophobia, first named in a 2008 UK survey, is the fear of what?
Being without your mobile phone
Being without your mobile phone worried about 53% of the phone owners surveyed, who admitted anxiety over a lost handset, a dead battery or no signal; the label squashes together 'no mobile phone phobia'.
Q 12Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the tongue-in-cheek name for the fear of what?
Long words
Long words get a deliberately monstrous name: it pads out sesquipedalian, from the poet Horace's jibe at 'words a foot and a half long', with a hippopotamus and a monster to make it longer still.
Q 13Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of what?
Q 21Mysophobia is the fear of what?
Germs and dirt
Germs and dirt can lock sufferers into ritual: the term was coined in 1879 for a patient who washed their hands again and again, and marathon handwashing is still its hallmark.
Q 22Gephyrophobia is the fear of crossing what?
Bridges
Bridges unnerve enough drivers that Michigan's Mackinac Bridge offers a remedy: for a small fee, a member of staff will take the wheel and drive the nervous motorist's car across.
Q 23Koumpounophobia, an aversion often attributed to Apple's Steve Jobs, is the fear of what?
Buttons
Buttons bothered Jobs, by many accounts, and the aversion is offered as the reason for his turtlenecks and his taste for touchscreens; koumpi is the modern Greek for button.
Peanut butter stuck to the roof of the mouth
Peanut butter stuck to the roof of the mouth sounds too silly for a medical term, and it is: the mock-Latin label, from arachis (peanut) and butyrum (butter), has been a running joke in print since the 1970s.
Q 14Which phobia is the fear of beards?
Pogonophobia
Pogonophobia made headlines in 2013, when Jeremy Paxman accused his BBC bosses of it after viewers and newspapers mocked the beard he had grown to present Newsnight.
Q 15Ophidiophobia is the fear of which animals?
Snakes
Snakes seem to have a hotline into the primate brain: in a 2013 study, neurons in monkeys' visual system fired more strongly at photographs of them than at pictures of monkey faces.
Q 16Cynophobia is the fear of which animals?
Dogs
Dogs are so common that cynophobia is unusually hard to live with: in severe cases people stay indoors or stop visiting friends for fear of meeting one.
Q 17Musophobia is the fear of what?
Mice and rats
Mice and rats were long said to scare even elephants: the Roman writer Pliny the Elder claimed elephants have 'the greatest aversion to the mouse of all animals' and refuse fodder one has touched.
Q 18Which phobia is the fear of the sea or of being in the ocean?
Thalassophobia
Thalassophobia is not a fear of water itself, which is aquaphobia: what frightens sufferers is the sea's depth and vastness, and whatever might be living down there.
Q 19Nyctophobia is a severe fear of what?
Night and darkness
Night and darkness are often not the real fear: sufferers dread what the dark might be hiding, an alarm some researchers trace to ancestors who slept in the open while predators hunted.
Q 20Emetophobia is the fear of what?
Vomiting
Vomiting frightens people with emetophobia into rearranging their lives: they may avoid restaurants, boats and unfamiliar food, and some women put off pregnancy for fear of morning sickness.
Q 24Anatidaephobia, the 'fear that somewhere a duck is watching you', comes from where?
A Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson
A Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson coined it as a gag: the name grafts Anatidae, the real zoological family of ducks, geese and swans, onto a fear nobody has.
Q 25Which fear is described by phasmophobia?
Ghosts
Ghosts gave a hit video game its title: in Phasmophobia (2020), a small team of players turn ghost hunter and must identify what kind of spirit is haunting each house.
Q 26Ergophobia is the fear of what?
Work
Work is ergon in Greek, which is why physicists measure work in ergs and ergonomics studies people at work; even the word 'energy' grows from the same root.
Q 27Which condition is described by phobophobia?
Dread of dread itself
Dread of dread itself feeds on its own symptoms: sufferers fear the racing heart and dizziness that fear brings, so the first flutter of anxiety can snowball into a panic attack.
Q 28Globophobia is the fear of what?
Balloons
Balloons are feared mostly for what they might do next: the commonest trigger is the bang of one bursting, so sufferers may refuse to touch a balloon or even go near one.
Q 29Alektorophobia is the fear of which farm animals?
Chickens
Chickens get the name from alektor, the Greek for a rooster, and the birds need not even be present: for some sufferers a photograph or a video of one is enough to bring on the fear.
Q 30Phobos, the Greek god of fear whose name is the root of the word phobia, was the son of which god?
Ares
Ares, god of war, took his sons Phobos and Deimos, fear and terror, into battle with him, which is why the two moons of Mars, his Roman counterpart, carry their names.