Lexicon ·
kittenfishing
noun, also verb (to kittenfish)
- Stated meaning
- Presenting yourself on a dating profile in a better light than is quite true: old photos, flattering angles, a rounded height.
- Operating meaning
- A profile rounded up in every field, by amounts small enough that each holder considers the total accurate.
- Origin
- Coined by the dating app Hinge in June 2017, on its own blog, as a lighter catfishing. The post is no longer online.
“In 2017, the dating app Hinge created the term kittenfishing,” Dictionary.com (opens in a new window) records. The app defined it as well-intentioned users (opens in a new window) “presenting themselves in an unrealistically positive light,” and itemized the profile: “photos that are outdated, heavily-filtered or strategically angled, text that has been ghost-written by a particularly witty friend and height that has been rounded by more than two inches.”
Hinge’s survey supplied the market’s position. Bustle reported (opens in a new window) that 38 percent of men and 24 percent of women said they had been kittenfished, and 2 percent of men and 1 percent of women said they had done it. In the same release 61 percent said it would happen less if they could see a video of the person. Cambridge Dictionary (opens in a new window) entered the word that December.
Under load, every field is rounded up by an amount its holder considers a rounding. No single figure is false enough to name, and the total arrives at the first date as a discrepancy nobody committed. The survey prices it exactly: roughly a third of users report receiving it, and almost nobody reports sending it. The difference is the volume of inflation the market reports as received from someone else.