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From Wikipedia:

I manually moved the stuff over from aviophobia to here because fear of flying already had a history. I pointed out that aviophobia is 1)not plain English, 2)two syllables longer than fear of flying, 3)a terribly constructed, illegitimate Greek-Latin hybrid, 4)a word that (ignoring the poor construction) means "Fear of Birds". Aviophobia simply isn't a legitimate word--it's not even in the OED.

Should "aviophobia" actually refer to a fear of birds instead of a fear of flying?

"Should" is such a tiresome word when it comes to language. There's no obligation for a word or phrase to have any particular meaning. The question is what aviophobia actually means--that is, what people use it to mean. If people use it to mean "fear of flying", then that's what it means. If people start using it to mean "a very small dog", well, that might be mildly confusing at first, but that'd be what it meant.

I'm with alynnidalar - there is no such thing as "should" when it comes to languages.

Fear of birds is already documented on Wikipedia as ornithophobia, and that word likely will remain supreme. I would've gone with something like "pterophobia" for fear of flying, but perhaps that sounds too ambiguous with "teraphobia", a hypothetical word for fear of monsters?

Wiktionary says that "aviophobia" perhaps comes from Frence "avion" whereas dictionary.com says that "aviophobia" perhaps comes from "aviation".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aviophobia

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/aviophobia?s=t

Soap wrote:I would've gone with something like "pterophobia" for fear of flying

Why, what's your reasoning?

Pterophobia sounds to me like a fear of wings ... like, a friend of mine is not exactly afraid of bird except for when they flap near her.