Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Photophobia
/ˌfoʊtəˈfoʊbiə/noun
Painful sensitivity to light, common in migraine, meningitis and eye inflammation.
The Greek roots
φῶς, φωτός
phôs, phōtós
light
φόβος
phóbos
fear, aversion
Literally: “aversion to light”
The story of the word
This is not a phobia in the psychiatric sense; nobody with photophobia is afraid of a lamp. In medical compounds φόβος regularly means intolerance or shrinking away rather than dread, the same sense a physicist uses when calling a surface hydrophobic. Medical Latin carried the term into English around 1800, and a doctor still treats sudden photophobia with fever as a reason to rule out meningitis fast.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- late 18th century
Same family
photographphotonphosphorusphobiaclaustrophobia
In a sentence
The photophobia hit before the headache did, and she went to lie down in the dark.
He wore sunglasses indoors for a week after the corneal abrasion, out of photophobia rather than affectation.