The story
Deliberately constructed to be a palindrome, combining the suffix -phobia with its reversed spelling. First appeared as a response to National Challenge #36, in a newspaper column written by J Baxter Newgate. The challenge was to invent a phobia. The column did not identify the entrant. (Source: Orlando Sentinel, Oct 22, 1977)
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.