Original Message
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 8:35 AM
Subject: "triskaidekaphobia"
"1.) How is the word "triskaidekaphobia" pronounced? Could someone please give the IPA transcription?"
tris-ky-dek-uh-FOH-bee-uh
"2.) Is this word well-known among most speakers of English?"
Indeed no. It is only known to Jeopardy contestants and those annoying people with word of the day calendars who think, for some unknown reason, that people will find it interesting. It is not a clinical term, and no psychologist would ever use it because there has never been a case where a person was only afraid of that number and nothing else, it is always accompanied by many morbid phobias, such as volatile reactivity to breaking mirrors or crossing black cats. It is basically a nonsense word invented by putting latin prefixes and suffixes together. Please note that there are words describing phobias for such things as oxygen and circular objects, with no known cases of actual infliction.
A teacher of mine once noted that there is no single clinical term for dried snot or boogers. He combined some latin, came out with the word "Rhinolith" - nose stones. It has since become the accepted clinical term for boogs within physiology.