Sunday, April 12, 2026

TODAY'S WORD

Gaslighting

GAS-lyt-ing

💬 Pop Culture Vocabulary

DEFINITION

(verb/noun) The act of manipulating someone into questioning their own memory, perception, or sanity — often through persistent denial, misdirection, and contradiction.

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It wasn't until she compared notes with a colleague that she realized she hadn't been forgetful or confused — she'd been gaslit for months.

💬 Why It's Trending

Gaslighting was Merriam-Webster's word of the year in 2022, with lookups up 1,740% — a sign of how urgently people were reaching for it. The term comes from the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a husband dims the house's gas lamps and then denies the flickering when his wife notices, making her doubt her own perception. It migrated from psychology into everyday vocabulary as awareness of emotional manipulation and coercive control grew — and once people had the word, they used it constantly.

🌍 WORD ORIGIN

Directly from the 1944 MGM film Gaslight, itself adapted from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 British stage play Gas Light. The specific image — a manipulator controlling the environment while denying observable reality — proved so precise and so transferable that the word outlasted the film by decades.