Do you know the meaning of word of the year “Gaslighting”?
The US dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster announced that their 2022 word of the year is “gaslighting”.
Merriam-Webster defines the word “gaslighting” as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own advantage”.
It is a word that describes behaviour that manipulates the mind, is misleading and downright deceitful.
According to the searches of the online dictionary, Interest in the term was up by 1,740% over the previous years. Unlike other popular terms, searches for “gaslighting” remained high throughout the year.
“It’s a word that has risen so quickly in the English language and especially in the last four years that it actually came as a surprise to me and to many of us”, Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large, said in an interview with AP.
“It was a word looked up frequently every single day of the year”, the editor said.
Merriam-Webster’s announcement said that “In this age of misinformation – of ‘fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes – gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time”.
The top definition of “gaslighting” from Merriam-Webster is a form of psychological manipulation, usually over an extended period of time, that “causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, the uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator”.
The word has become increasingly popular recently as editorials, podcasts, and TV programmes attempt to analyse relationships and particularly more subtle types of abuse from a psychological perspective. But its popularity among users of online dictionaries is also probably due to its occasionally ambiguous and vague meaning.
