-holic
See also: holič
English
Alternative forms
- -aholic, -oholic
Etymology
Back-formation from alcoholic.
Suffix
-holic
- Denotes addiction to the substance or activity of the stem word.
- 2017, David Friend, The Naughty Nineties:
- Trump was also a horndog, a braggart, and a social-media-holic—just like voters were.
- 2017, David Friend, The Naughty Nineties:
Usage notes
- The form -holic is usually used with words already ending with vowels. For stems ending with consonants, the phonetically pleasant forms -aholic or -oholic may be more common.
- In contemporary modern English "-holic" is a suffix that can be added to a subject to denote an addiction to it. The term is derived from alcoholism, one of the first addictions to be widely identified both medically and socially.
- There are other more formal terms for such addictions, many uncommonly used. For example, dipsomania, a medico-legal term for alcoholism, is used less than 1% as often as "alcoholism" in a large sample of academic writing over the last 20 years; other examples are given in the following table.
| Colloquial term | Addiction to | Medico-legal term |
|---|---|---|
| danceaholic | dance | choreomania |
| workaholic | work | ergomania |
| sexaholic | sex | erotomania, satyromania, nymphomania |
| sugarholic | sugar | saccharomania |
Derived terms
► <a class='CategoryTreeLabel CategoryTreeLabelNs14 CategoryTreeLabelCategory' href='/wiki/Category:English_words_suffixed_with_-holic' title='Category:English words suffixed with -holic'>English words suffixed with -holic</a>
Anagrams
- choil, choli