Word | xenophobia |
---|---|
Date | December 20, 2019 |
Type | noun |
Syllables | zen-uh-FOH-bee-uh |
Etymology | If you look back to the ancient Greek terms that underlie the word xenophobia, you'll discover that xenophobic individuals are literally "stranger fearing." Xenophobia, that elegant-sounding name for an aversion to persons unfamiliar, ultimately derives from two Greek terms: xenos, which can be translated as either "stranger" or "guest," and phobos, which means either "fear" or "flight." Phobos is the ultimate source of all English -phobia terms, but many of those were actually coined in English or New Latin using the combining form -phobia. Xenophobia itself came to us by way of New Latin and first appeared in print in English in the late 19th century. |
Examples | "George Kennan, who served at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow…, wrote in 1947 that Soviet hostility toward the West was based upon more than Marxist ideology or traditional Russian xenophobia." — Philip Gold, Insight, 29 Dec. 1986 "Although the Great Depression prompted an exodus of foreign workers—spurred in part by a wave of popular xenophobia—the presence of foreigners in France was sustained by the arrival of refugees from the Spanish Civil War." — Peter Gatrell, The Unsettling of Europe, 2019 |
Definition | : fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign |
Tags: wordoftheday::noun
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