A long word for a short fear
Triskaidekaphobia means the fear of the number thirteen. The word is built from Greek parts: tris for three, kai for and, deka for ten, followed by phobia, fear. It is a learned coinage, not an ancient term, and it does not appear in classical Greek. The word is generally traced to the early twentieth century, and the psychiatrist Isador Coriat is often credited with an early use, though the earliest printed use is hard to pin down with certainty.
It is worth being careful about what the word means. In everyday use it describes a superstition: a reluctance to be associated with thirteen. A clinical phobia is a different matter, a persistent and disabling fear. Most people who avoid a thirteenth floor or a thirteenth guest would not describe themselves as having a phobia, and the label is used more often for humour or emphasis than for diagnosis. The related fear of Friday the 13th has its own, even longer name, which is a later coinage built in the same way.
Why thirteen?
The reasons given for the unease about thirteen are many, and none is proven. Common stories include a thirteenth guest at a meal bringing misfortune, with the Last Supper and a Norse banquet cited as examples, and the idea that thirteen follows the “completeness” of twelve. The wider story is covered in the article on unlucky thirteen. What matters here is that a belief held by some people, whatever its source, has been strong enough to affect how buildings are labelled.
The missing floor
Many buildings, especially in North America and parts of Europe, do not have a floor labelled thirteen. In a typical case, the elevator buttons go from 12 to 14. The use of the practice is widespread enough that it is often noticed, but there is no precise figure that can be quoted reliably, and it varies by country, building type and owner.
Several points are worth knowing.
- The floor still exists. A building with floors labelled 12 and 14 does not have a gap in its structure. The floor that carries the label 14 is physically the thirteenth storey, where the ground floor is counted as the first, as in North America. Skipping the label does not change the number of storeys.
- Alternatives to a gap. Some buildings label the floor “12A” or “12B”, or use a letter such as “M” for a mechanical or mezzanine level in that position. Others simply keep thirteen. The choice is generally made by the developer, the owner or the marketing team, not by a rule.
- No requirement. In most places there is no law requiring a building to skip thirteen, and none forbidding it. It is a convention, adopted because owners expect that some tenants or guests would prefer it. Some people would call this a commercial judgment: a label costs nothing, and a missing label could avoid an objection.
- Beyond floors. The same logic can apply to hotel rooms, hospital rooms, apartment numbers, airport gates and aircraft seat rows. Some airlines are known to leave out row thirteen, and some hotels leave out room thirteen. Practice varies from one operator to another.
In places where the practice is common, it is usually applied without much comment, so many occupants may never notice it. In others, it is the subject of jokes about “the building that doesn’t have a thirteenth floor”.
A comparison with skipped fours
The thirteenth floor is not the only skipped label. In parts of East Asia, the number four is left out of floor, room or seat numbering, because its pronunciation resembles the word for death, a custom discussed under tetraphobia in East Asia. In some places, floors such as 14 or 24 are also skipped, since they contain a four. The comparison is useful because the logic is different. The Western thirteen is usually explained through stories and associations, whereas the East Asian four is explained through a sound-alike in the spoken language. Both are examples of building conventions shaped by number beliefs, and both show that a custom can become part of ordinary architecture without anyone claiming that the number itself has power.
Italian practice shows how local this is. Italy has a taboo on seventeen rather than thirteen, and thirteen is not treated the same way there. A building numbering scheme that is cautious in one country may not be needed in another.
Does it matter?
A few practical points are sometimes raised. One is that skipping a floor label could, in principle, cause confusion in an emergency, if a person counting floors from the outside reached a different number than the label inside. In practice, fire services and building codes tend to work from the physical layout and from clearly posted signs, and it is not known to be a significant problem. This is a modest observation, and no one should treat it as a firm finding.
Another is the question of whether avoiding thirteen has any effect on events, such as whether a skipped label changes anyone’s luck. There is no good evidence that it does. Claims about the economic cost of thirteen superstitions that are sometimes quoted in the press should be treated with caution, since the figures are usually unsourced and the effects are hard to measure.
What remains is a small cultural fact. A word that sounds technical, a label that disappears from an elevator panel, and a floor that is nonetheless there: all of this shows how a belief can leave a mark on the built environment while the belief itself remains a matter of personal attitude.