Xenophobia
//ˌzɛn.əˈfəʊ.bɪ.ə// noun
noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A fear, antipathy, or hatred of strangers or foreigners. countable, uncountable
"The great sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism both fall under “allosemitism”: literally Othering the Jew. He defined it not as resentment of what is different, which is xenophobia, but rather of what defies order and clear categories. In 1997, he wrote, “The Jew is ambivalence incarnate. And ambivalence is ambivalence mostly because it cannot be contemplated without ambivalent feeling: it is simultaneously attractive and repelling.”"
- 2 a fear of foreigners or strangers wordnet
- 3 A fear of aliens. countable, nonstandard, rare, uncountable
Example
More examples"This is nothing more than xenophobia."
Etymology
From xeno- + -phobia.
More for "xenophobia"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.