Words

Triskaidekaphobia

Greek treis, kai, deka, plus phobos
Fear of the number 13, and the reason your hotel floor jumps from 12 to 14. The word is barely a century old; the architects obey it anyway.
Documented

A word coined as a punchline

The trail starts in Tuke's 1892 Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, where triakaidekaphobia appears in a deliberately comic list of over-coined phobias. Isador Coriat used the triskaidekaphobia spelling by 1910 in Abnormal Psychology, and the variant spellings, three-and-ten versus thirteen, fought in medical dictionaries for decades. The fear itself is documented as younger than its reputation: the earliest attestations of 13 as unlucky come after the Middle Ages, with the Last Supper seating and the Norse dinner-crashing Loki both failing to appear in the old sources.

Assessment: The word's coinage and the superstition's shallow roots are both documented, the shallow roots by their absence from medieval records. A rare case where the archive can date a fear.
Stories

Thirteen at the table

The story everyone knows: thirteen sat at the Last Supper and one was a traitor, so thirteen at a table means one will die within the year. The Norse twin tells of Loki crashing a feast of twelve gods as the thirteenth, ending in Balder's death. Both stories are everywhere; neither appears in the medieval record as an unluckiness origin. Meanwhile the tarot's Death card really is number 13, attested since the 15th century, the one old source that actually shows up.

Assessment: The tarot evidence is documented; the banquet stories are modern retrofitting onto old texts that do not contain them. The retrofit is itself the finding.
Interesting claims

The fear that builds buildings

The claim: triskaidekaphobia is the most architecturally powerful superstition in history, an idea with physical load-bearing consequences. Elevator sequences skip 13, airlines skip row 13, Apollo 13's accident reinforced the pattern, and NASA quietly avoided STS-13 ever after. No demon in the archive has altered more concrete than this invented fear, which raises the claim's real point: a number with no power at all exercises power the moment enough people obey it.

Assessment: The skipped floors and rows are documented and verifiable in any city. The power-of-belief framing is the archive's own observation. The demon is imaginary; the elevator panel is not.
Sources and further reading
  1. Tuke, Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (1892), the comic coinage list
  2. Coriat, Abnormal Psychology (1910), the triskaidekaphobia spelling
  3. Court de Gebelin (1781), the tarot thirteen always unlucky
  4. Wikipedia's attestation record: no pre-medieval sources for the unlucky 13
Worth asking

If the superstition is younger than the word for it, which one is the actual origin of the fear?

Open in the interactive archive
GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+