claustrophobia

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for claustrophobia is 14 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌklɒs.trəˈfəʊ.bi.ə/. Corpus data places it at rank #49,254 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The abnormal fear of closed, tight places.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 21 documented wrong-spelling variants for claustrophobia, with forms such as "calustrophobia", "cclaustrophobia", and "clasutrophobia". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 1 confusable-pair relationship, "claustrophobic", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin claustrum (“a shut-in place”), from Latin claudō (“I shut, close; I imprison, confine”) + -phobia. First attested in the British Medical Journal. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is claustrophobia, spelled C-L-A-U-S-T-R-O-P-H-O-B-I-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.