Today’s PAF (Performing Arts Festival) raised an interesting linguistic issue—what makes a word a word?

In the PAF, Rajiv Gandhi’s character was called a mediaphobe since he was scared of facing the media. He retaliated, in almost a childishly innocent manner, by saying that _mediaphobe_ wasn’t even a word and so he couldn’t be called one. He went on to say that he couldn’t _be_ a mediaphobe for the same reason.

It will be clear to any one that any arbitrary sequence of sounds can’t be considered as a _word_ of a given language. For instance, if I were to call someone a shankle, they would certainly be right in saying that _shankle_ isn’t a word and that my assertion had no semantic content. Sure enough, _shankle_ isn’t found in any dictionary either.

But the task of determining what counts as word is not as easy as whipping out your favourite dictionary and checking whether it contains that word. We frequently form new terms by adding commonly used suffixes to commonly used words. Many of these terms aren’t found in dictionaries. Also, compositional phrases (such as third city) don’t usually get a place into the dictionary, unless the composition has an idiomatic meaning different from what can be derived from the individual parts (such as third world, which does exist in dictionaries).

_-phobe_  is a highly productive English suffix that, when combined with a noun X, makes a noun denoting a person who is afraid of X. Note that this suffix can be added to an infinite number of nouns, and it is impossible to list all of them in any dictionary, whether printed or online. That doesn’t of course mean that dictionaries don’t have words of the form [*phobe]. If you search on OneLook for the pattern [*phobe], you get around 80 results, but one glance at those words will tell you that the first part of most of those words comes from Greek or some other language and is not analyzable in English.

Mediaphobe, then, is a perfectly legitimate construction of English. Today’s dialogue wasn’t even the first instance of the same. If you Google for the term, you will get a few previous uses too. And of course, whether someone is something or not has nothing to do with whether there exists a single lexicalized term for the same.