Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Mythomania
/ˌmɪθəˈmeɪniə/noun
A compulsion to invent elaborate and often self-flattering falsehoods.
The Greek roots
μῦθος
mŷthos
story, tale
μανία
manía
madness, frenzy
Literally: “story madness”
The story of the word
μῦθος began as any spoken thing, a word or the plot of a play, and drifted toward untruth only later. Anton Delbrück described the clinical pattern in 1891 under the Latin label pseudologia phantastica, and the Greek name came out of French psychiatry soon after. It has never been a diagnosis in its own right, which is why the word does more work in biography than in medicine.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
Same family
mythmythologykleptomaniapyromania
In a sentence
His therapist called it mythomania; his friends had simply stopped asking follow-up questions.