Agoraphobia

//ˌæɡ.ɚ.əˈfoʊ.bi.ə// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The fear of wide open spaces, crowds, or uncontrolled social conditions.

    "Now, you know that the classical analytical explanation of agoraphobia of the early 1900s was that it represented a street phobia because the patient equated streetwalking with prostitutional activity[…]"

  2. 2
    a morbid fear of open spaces (as fear of being caught alone in some public place) wordnet
  3. 3
    An aversion to markets. rare

    "For quotations using this term, see Citations:agoraphobia."

Synonyms

All synonyms
xenophobia

Example

More examples

"Mary and Tom suffer from agoraphobia."

Etymology

From Latin agoraphobia, from Ancient Greek ἀγορά (agorá, “assembly”) + φοβία (phobía, “fear”). By surface analysis, agora + -phobia. Coined by Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal in 1871.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.