A.Word.A.Day --ombrophobe

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Feb 3, 2025

This week’s theme
Words made with combining forms

This week’s words
ombrophobe

Illustration: Anu Garg + AI

Previous week’s theme
There’s a word for it

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

Sometimes when you need just the right word and can’t find it, do you wish you at least had parts so you could assemble one yourself?

Well, there are such parts in the language. We call them combining forms.* Fear of heights? Take one part height (Greek acro-) and one part fear (-phobia), and you’ve got acrophobia. Another example is plutocracy (government by the wealthy). From Greek pluto- (wealth) + -cracy (rule).

This week we’ve picked a bunch of combining forms and we’ll mix and match and see what words we can make with them. Here are the combining forms we have in our hands, though we’ll not necessarily join them in this order:

ombro- (rain)
melo- (music)
cano- (dog)
archaeo- (ancient)
sarco- (flesh)

-phobe (one who fears)
-latry (worship)
-mania (excessive enthusiasm)
-philist (lover)
-phagous (feeding)

* What are combining forms? Think of them as Lego (from Danish leg: play + godt: well) bricks of language. As the term indicates, a combining form is a linguistic atom that occurs only in combination with some other form which could be a word, another combining form, or an affix (unlike a combining form, an affix can’t attach to another affix).

So, let’s get ready to “lego” of our inhibitions and build some words!

On a different note, I ran the Mumbai Marathon a week ago. It was rough. High temp 91°F and a start time of 5 am. But I finished it. Where should I run next? Keep your suggestions coming.

ombrophobe

PRONUNCIATION:

(AHM-bruh-fohb)

MEANING:

noun:
1. One who hates or fears rain.
2. A plant that cannot tolerate rainy conditions.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek ombro- (rain) + -phobe (one who fears or hates). Earliest documented use: 1897.

NOTES:

Are you a xerophilic someone who cancels a picnic at the first sign of clouds? Do you keep an umbrella and a raincoat by the door, like loyal sentries defending your dry sanctuary? If so, today’s the perfect word for your rainy-day woes. And two more to strengthen your arsenal: gamp and bumbershoot. But a little pluvial H₂O never hurt anyone. In Seattle, we sing in the rain, organize puddle jumping parties, and, well, hike, run, and dance, rain or shine.
(Umbrella, by the way, comes from Latin umbra for shadow, not Greek ombro for rain.)

USAGE:

“[In The Notebook], during a deluge whose quick start puts Florida thunderstorms to shame, Allie and Noah begin to clear the air and reunite with a steaming hot kiss. Even an ombrophobe may hazard some time out in the rain for a kiss like that.”
Lauren Delgado; Cinema Sweethearts; Northwest Florida Daily News (Fort Walton Beach, Florida); Feb 8, 2015.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. -Gertrude Stein, novelist, poet, and playwright (3 Feb 1874-1946)

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