Meaning
Psychological manipulation in which a person persistently denies or distorts another's experiences until the victim doubts their own memory, perception and sanity, often becoming dependent on the manipulator. The word is now also used loosely for any sustained attempt to make someone distrust what they can plainly see. Strongly negative and clinically loaded; frequently criticised as overused therapy-speak for ordinary disputes. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Named after Patrick Hamilton's 1938 British play Gas Light, in which a husband manipulates his wife into believing she is mentally ill while he secretly searches their attic for jewels; the 1940 British film and the 1944 American remake with Ingrid Bergman carried the story further. The gerund never appears in play or films: its earliest recorded use is 1961, and it stayed rare for decades, with early clinical cases including Barton and Whitehead's 1969 reports. The New York Times first used it in a 1995 Maureen Dowd column and printed it only a handful of times over the next twenty years. It surged in the mid-2010s (the American Dialect Society named 'gaslight' the most useful new word of 2016) and Merriam-Webster named gaslighting its Word of the Year for 2022, noting that lookups had ballooned as the word broadened well beyond the clinical sense.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- gaslight
- gaslighted
- gaslit
- to gaslight someone
Usage Examples
- For years he insisted she had never said those things, a slow gaslighting that eroded her confidence.
- Calling every disagreement gaslighting cheapens a word that describes serious, sustained manipulation.
- The memo proves the timeline, so continuing to deny it reads like institutional gaslighting.