credophile.
One who gets positive pleasure from belief and pain from doubt; one who collects beliefs not for utility but for glitter and for whom, once he or she has embraced a belief, it takes something more than mere disproof to make to let go.
Meaning & usage
One who gets positive pleasure from belief and pain from doubt; one who collects beliefs not for utility but for glitter and for whom, once he or she has embraced a belief, it takes something more than mere disproof to make to let go.
One who is especially gullible.
Where this word comes from
Coined by L. Sprague de Camp from Latin credo (“to believe”) + -phile (“liker, lover”). First known use is in a personal letter from de Camp to James Randi (which is thought to still exist in Randi's archives but is not readily available for study). The word "credophile" and the adjective form "credophilic" were used by L. Sprague de Camp at least as early as 1952 in "Lands Beyond" which he co-authored with Willie Ley (De Camp, L. Sprague & Willie Ley. Lands Beyond. NY: Rinehart, 1952, pp. 268, 272
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.