Agoraphobia
/ˌæɡərəˈfoʊbiə/noun
Anxiety about places or situations that would be hard to escape from, often leading to avoiding them entirely.
The Greek roots
Literally: “fear of the assembly place”
The story of the word
Carl Otto Westphal named it in 1871 after three Berlin patients who could not cross an open square without panic. The ἀγορά was not a shopping street but the civic centre, where citizens assembled, argued and were judged, which suits the disorder better than market does. Two more English words come from the same ground: category, from speaking against someone in public, and allegory, from speaking in public with a meaning aimed elsewhere.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → German → English
- First recorded
- 1871
Same family
In a sentence
The agoraphobia narrowed her routes to three streets and then to none.
Treatment works, but it involves going outside, which is the part nobody wants to hear.