numerophobe

English

Etymology

From numero- +‎ -phobe.

Noun

numerophobe (plural numerophobes)

1. (rare) Someone who hates or is afraid of numbers.

   Antonym: numerophile

   • 1983, Duncan Kennedy, Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy, →ISBN, page 5:

     If you are on the invisible other side of the mainstream, you are likely to be a humanist, maybe even an artist, maybe a numerophobe, or a person with a solid contempt for the cultural and intellectual style of right-wing youth.

   • 1994, Tony Waldron, Counting the Dead: The Epidemiology of Skeletal Populations, Wiley, →ISBN, page XIII:

     Statistics and mathematics have been kept scarce and simple and even the most extreme 'numerophobe' should find nothing to produce anxiety or panic.

   • 1998, David P. Henige, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate, University of Oklahoma Press, →ISBN, page 135:

     By painting the critics as mindless numerophobes, he implants the notion that their doubts are not to be entertained.

   • 2015 April 9, Michael Bertin, “Why Soccer's Most Popular Advanced Stat Kind Of Sucks”, in Deadspin‎^[1], archived from the original on 2022-08-07:

     Even the biggest numerophobe would have a hard time poo-pooing something that tries to measure the one stat that matters in soccer (namely: how many did you score?).

   • 2020 March 23, Phil Plait, “Why do we have leap days?”, in SYFY WIRE‎^[2], archived from the original on 2022-11-29:

     This post has math in it. Quite a bit. But it's really just arithmetic; decimals and multiplication. If you're a numerophobe, then skip to the end, but you'll have to trust me on the numbers.

Related terms

• numerophobia
• numerophobic