The term nomophobia first appeared in 2008 in the context of a study commissioned by UK market research organisation YouGov, which set out to examine the anxieties suffered by a sample of over 2000 British mobile phone users. Immediately seized upon by the media, the word is a catchy contraction of the expression no mobile (phone) phobia, and although mobiles are routinely referred to as cell phones in American English, evidence suggests that nomophobia has caught on as a description of the condition in the US and other countries too. Following the model of many other phobias, there’s an adjectival derivative nomophobic, which can also be used as a countable noun to describe sufferers, alternatively known as nomophobes.

The term nomophobia first appeared in 2008 in the context of a study commissioned by UK market research organisation YouGov, which set out to examine the anxieties suffered by a sample of over 2000 British mobile phone users. Immediately seized upon by the media, the word is a catchy contraction of the expression no mobile (phone) phobia, and although mobiles are routinely referred to as cell phones in American English, evidence suggests that nomophobia has caught on as a description of the condition in the US and other countries too. Following the model of many other phobias, there’s an adjectival derivative nomophobic, which can also be used as a countable noun to describe sufferers, alternatively known as nomophobes.