workaholic

n.
One who has a compulsive and unrelenting need to work.

workaholism work'a·hol'ism n.

Origin: 1971

Alcoholic, the parent of all addictive words, has been with us for over a century. It is first attested in 1891. But its numerous dysfunctional (1959) offspring, like workaholic, are more recent. It poses the question whether Americans became addicted in more ways during the twentieth century, or whether we just finally recognized that we were so variously addicted.

The founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935 focused attention on alcohol addiction, as well as AA's 12-step program and "support group" (1969) meetings for dealing with addictions. In the 1960s, someone had the idea of taking -holic as a suffix meaning "addict", and a whole new category of addictions followed. One of the first and most important is workaholic. It was announced in the 1968 article "On Being a 'Workaholic' (A serious Jest)" in the journal Pastoral Psychology: "I have dubbed this addiction of myself and my fellow ministers 'workaholism,'" wrote Wayne Oates, a professor of psychology of religion at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. However, it was the appearance of Oates's book Confessions of a Workaholic in 1971 that propelled that term and prompted many writers to start using the suffixes -aholic, -holic, or -oholic to describe "all-consuming obsessions," not all of them so serious.

In the 1970s, if not obsessed with work, we could be addicted to play, as in golfaholic, footballaholic, basketball-oholic, bingoholic, or just plain leisureholic; to foods, as in beefaholic, peanuntholic, and ice creamaholic; and to Substances (1975), as in hashaholic (for hashish) or mariholic (for marijuana), as well as tobaccoholic. An American could be a book-oholic, catalogueoholic, eclipsoholic, gambler-oholic, game show-oholic, note-oholic, or phone-oholic. Other obsessions for which authors coined terms with -aholic in the 1970s include worry, news, credit, punning, shopping, and junk.

Many of these words have a short life span, but they are easily reinvented. The most predictable term in this whole family is the one which always seems to reappear just before Valentine's Day: chocoholic, another invention of the workaholic era.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - arbejdsnarkoman

Nederlands (Dutch)
iemand die alleen voor zijn werk leeft

Français (French)
n. - bourreau de travail

Deutsch (German)
n. - Workaholic, arbeitswütiger Mensch

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - εργασιομανής

Italiano (Italian)
maniaco del lavoro

Português (Portuguese)
n. - pessoa que trabalha muito e gosta de trabalhar (m)

Русский (Russian)
человек "горящий" на работе, трудоголик

Español (Spanish)
n. - trabajoadicto, fanático del trabajo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - arbetsnarkoman

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
工作第一的人, 专心工作的人

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 工作第一的人, 專心工作的人

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 지나치게 일하는 사람, 일벌레

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 仕事中毒の人, 仕事の虫

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) المدمن للعمل أي من يعمل بلا هوادة‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מכור לעבודתו‬

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