-holic
Origin
Back-formation from {{3}}
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.
{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Colloquial term
! Addiction to
! Medico-legal term
|-
| danceaholic
| dance
| choreomania
|-
| work
| ergomania
|-
| sexaholic
| sex
| erotomania, satyromania, nymphomania
|-
| sugarholic
| sugar
| saccharomania
|-
|
|}