mania
noun
excessive excitement or enthusiasm; craze.
mania
1 American
[mey-nee-uh, meyn-yuh]
/ ˈmeɪ ni ə, ˈmeɪn jə /
noun
-
manias
plural
-
excessive excitement or enthusiasm; craze.
The country has a mania for soccer.
-
Psychiatry. manic disorder.
Mania
2
American
[mey-nee-uh, meyn-yuh]
/ ˈmeɪ ni ə, ˈmeɪn jə /
noun
-mania
3
American
mania
1
British
/ ˈmeɪnɪə /
noun
-
a mental disorder characterized by great excitement and occasionally violent behaviour See also manic-depressive
-
an obsessional enthusiasm or partiality
a mania for mushrooms
-mania
2
British
combining form
mania
Cultural
Usage
What does -mania mean? The combining form -mania is used like a suffix meaning literally “mania,” often in the sense of "enthusiasm, often of an extreme or transient nature." It is often used in scientific and technical terms, especially in psychology. The form -mania comes from Greek manía, meaning “madness.” Latin has three translations for manía: dēmentia, furor, and rabiēs, all meaning “madness.” Find out more at our entries for dementia, furor, and rabies.
Discover More
A “mania” in popular terms is an intense enthusiasm or craze.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of mania
First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English, from Latin, from Greek manía “madness”; akin to maenad, mind
Explanation
Mania is an extreme interest, desire, or craze. If you dye your dog's fur to match the colors of your favorite football team, you might be suffering from sportsmania. Mania has for centuries been associated with “madness” or “mental derangement.” It's still used in the mental health fields to mean the excitable, overactive phase of bipolar disorder or, as a suffix, to describe a compulsion, such as kleptomania (to steal) or pyromania (to set fires). More generally, it might be used as a suffix to describe enthusiasm, as in Beatlemania (The Beatles) or Pottermania (Harry Potter).
Vocabulary lists containing mania
Stargirl
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And Then There Were None
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It's Madness!: Mania
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
But, unlike dot-com mania, the AI trade is continuing.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 2, 2026
Pressured speech - a rapid, frantic way of talking - can be a sign of mania.
From BBC ● Aug. 27, 2026
“It’s a film noir that is also starring cartoon characters, and it’s got this collision of tones,” Green says of Zemeckis’ landmark, a movie that somehow bridges bonk-on-the-head mania with a voluptuous femme fatale.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 26, 2026
The mania is intense for a chain that entered the American market relatively recently.
From Slate ● Aug. 24, 2026
Her strange somnambulism seemed suspicious to her, as did her new mania for taking food to her room.
From "The House of the Spirits: A Novel" by Isabel Allende
Appeared in the September 11, 2025, print edition as 'Mining Deal Reflects Copper Mania'.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 10, 2025
The seven-time Ballon d’Or winner who spurred Messi Mania in the United States by joining MLS will now turn his attention to Argentina’s World Cup qualifiers against Brazil and Uruguay in November.
From Washington Times ● Oct. 22, 2023
It was Taylor Mania in Seattle over the weekend, but the rest of the country was flipping over another American icon: Barbie.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 24, 2023
And Toy Story Midway Mania, a shooting game featuring characters from the titular franchise, will close July 17.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 28, 2023
She enjoyed the WWF Wrestling Mania shows, where Hulk Hogan and Mr. Perfect, whose necks were wider than their heads, wore spangled Lycra leggings and beat each other up brutally.
From "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy
Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian High summer -mania, if such a thing really exists, appears to be a fitful condition, a complaint that passes in a rush leaving its victims mercifully unpocked.
From The Guardian ● Jun. 25, 2010
For Kedrosky, then, the behavioral aspects of manias and bubbles don’t change: Investors chase things at the wrong time and then panic.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 1, 2026
It’s hard to value the potential growth of such businesses, which is why speculative meme-stock manias can take hold so easily.
From Barron's ● Oct. 23, 2025
“Bloodline” reminds me of the breed of darkly comic postwar novels by Robert Coover, William H. Gass, Harry Crews and others, in which regional manias stand in for a broader national lunacy.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 17, 2025
Berg, a Swiss writer and social activist, sprays her fury across the whole landscape of technological and economic manias that are rendering the 21st century intolerable.
From Washington Post ● Dec. 13, 2022
Used to his manias, Aureliano paid no attention to him.
From "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
