Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Xenophobia
/ˌzɛnəˈfoʊbiə/noun
Fear or hostility towards foreigners.
The Greek roots
ξένος
xénos
stranger, guest
φόβος
phóbos
fear, panic
Literally: “fear of strangers”
The story of the word
ξένος cuts both ways in Greek: it means the stranger and the host who takes him in, and ξενία, guest-friendship, was a binding duty with Zeus himself as its enforcer. The compound is modern, formed around 1900 on the pattern of the clinical phobia names. Xenon, the noble gas, comes from the same root, named in 1898 because it was the strange one.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- early 20th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
xenonxenophilephobiaxenolith
In a sentence
The campaign ran on xenophobia and very little else.