excessive excitement or enthusiasm; craze.
The country has a mania for soccer.
Psychiatry. manic disorder.
a mental disorder characterized by great excitement and occasionally violent behaviour See also manic-depressive
an obsessional enthusiasm or partiality
a mania for mushrooms
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.
A “mania” in popular terms is an intense enthusiasm or craze.
First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English, from Latin, from Greek manía “madness”; akin to maenad, mind
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).
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Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Half of that was in April alone, as SpaceX mania surged.
From MarketWatch • May 27, 2026
“The pace of It — that someone would be up all night tweeting — is a clinical indicator of some kind of either mania or sundowning.”
From Salon • May 26, 2026
The boom in tech stocks is driving some companies to levels not seen since the dot-com mania.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 13, 2026
Matcha mania may have been sweeping the world, but Nielsen IQ data shows sales of other types of tea - including green tea, kombucha and cold carbonated tea - are all rising, too.
From BBC • May 8, 2026
Mama, with her mania for cleaning everything top to bottom, was mortified.
From "Bad Boy" by Walter Dean Myers
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.
