FOMO

See also: FoMO

English

Alternative forms

• FoMO

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈfoʊ.moʊ/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈfəʊ.məʊ/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -əʊməʊ

Noun

FOMO (uncountable)

1. Initialism of fear of missing out.

   Antonym: JOMO

   Coordinate term: FOBO

   • 2010, Charlie Taylor, Divas & Door Slammers: The Secret to Having a Better Behaved Teenager, Vermillion, published 2010, →ISBN, page 197:

     Often, because of FOMO, they are reluctant to do these things on their own, but if you can get their friends involved as well, the resistance disappears.

   • 2011 April 9, Jenna Worthham, “Feel Like a Wallflower? Maybe It’s Your Facebook Wall”, in The New York Times:

     On those occasions, she said, her knee-jerk reaction is often to post an account of a cool thing she has done, or to upload a particularly fun picture from her weekend. This may make her feel better — but it can generate FOMO in another unsuspecting person.

   • 2013, Daniel Reimold, Journalism of Ideas: Brainstorming, Developing, and Selling Stories in the Digital Age‎^[1], Routledge, published 2013, →ISBN:

     In a Huffington Post write-up last spring, a Georgetown University student confirmed FOMO "is a widespread problem on college campuses … Even when we'd rather catch up on sleep or melt our brain with some reality television, we feel compelled to seek bigger and better things from our weekend. We fear that if we don't partake in every Saturday night's fever, something truly amazing will happen, leaving us hopelessly behind."

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:FOMO.

Derived terms

• FOODMO

Verb

FOMO (third-person singular simple present FOMOs, present participle FOMOing or FOMO-ing, simple past and past participle FOMOed or FOMO'd)

1. (intransitive) To experience FOMO (“fear of missing out”); to act on one's FOMO, often impulsively [(often) with into].
   • 2024 August, Andrew R. Chow, “Total Rug” (chapter 15), in Cryptomania: Hype, Hope, and the Fall of FTX's Billion-Dollar Fintech Empire, New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 113:

     Within hours of selling out, AfroDroids NFTs started getting flipped on OpenSea for thousands of dollars, with new investors FOMO-ing into the project in case it became the newest PFP project to go to the moon.

Further reading

• fear of missing out on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Anagrams

• foom, mofo, moof