Origin

C20: on the pattern of alcoholic

-holic

variant of -aholic:

chocoholic.

Related Word

chocoholic

-holic→ -aholic.

-holicsee -aholic.

-holic

combining form. a person who is obsessed with or has a strong craving for something; a _____addict: Chocoholic = a person who has a strong craving for chocolate.

[variant of -aholic]

-holic
-aholic, -oholic

Suffix

Denotes addiction to the substance or activity of the stem word.

Etymology

Back-formation from alcoholic.

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.

Colloquial term	Addiction to	Medico-legal term
danceaholic	dance	choreomania
workaholic	work	ergomania
sexaholic	sex	erotomania, satyromania, nymphomania
sugarholic	sugar	saccharomania
chocoholic	chocolate

Derived terms

English words suffixed with -holic

suffix forming nouns