A storyphile is someone who loves stories.
It’s not a word you’ll find in the dictionary. Yet. But it’s a good word nonetheless—especially for a former classics* major like me.
It combines the word story with the suffix –phile, which means someone who loves. It’s from the Greek philos, which means beloved or loving.
The words story and history also come from Greek. In fact, they have the same Greek root—historein—which the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a learning or knowing by inquiry, an account of one’s inquiries, narrative, history.”
Oxford goes on to explain that story is an aphetic form of history. I had to look up what that meant.
Aphesis is the term for how words gradually lose short, usually unaccented syllables. History becomes story, until becomes till, attention becomes ’tention, alone becomes lone, and so on.
So I’m happy to be a storyphile. Or even a historyphile.
I’m also a bibliophile (someone who loves books) and an oenophile (someone who loves wine). And those words are in the dictionary.
*Classics is the study of ancient Greek, Roman and Near Eastern history, art, architecture, literature, religion and philosophy.