Lexicon ·
ghostlighting
noun, also verb (to ghostlight)
- Stated meaning
- Disappearing on someone, then insisting when you come back that nothing of the kind happened.
- Operating meaning
- A disappearance followed by a return that disputes the record of the disappearance, so the party who was left is asked to correct their own books.
- Origin
- Reported by the Mirror in June 2023 as a blend of ghosting and gaslighting, with no coiner named. Cambridge Dictionary entered it that October.
In June 2023 the Mirror (opens in a new window) reported the word as a blend: “Ghostlighting mixes together ghosting - which is where a potential love interest disappears without an explanation - with the more sinister gaslighting.” On the return, the article said, “they’ll use gaslighting to deny it ever happened.” Cambridge Dictionary (opens in a new window) entered it that October as ending a relationship “by suddenly stopping all communication with them, then trying to make them believe that this did not actually happen and they must have imagined it.”
The word completes a sequence the genus had been building for 8 years. Ghosting leaves without a sentence. Zombieing returns without one. Ghostlighting returns with a sentence, and the sentence is that nothing happened.
Under load, ghostlighting presents a restated set of accounts. The silence is in both parties’ records, and the returning party proposes to remove it from one of them. The party who was left holds the only evidence, which is the gap in the thread. Every messaging app timestamps that gap, which makes this the one fraud in the genus that the record disproves without assistance, provided someone opens it.