Gaslighting

1938Internet slang / catchphraseclassic

Also known as: Gaslight · The Gaslight Treatment

Gaslighting is internet slang for psychological manipulation from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play that went mainstream in 2016, became 2022 Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year, and inspired "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss.

Gaslighting is internet slang for psychologically manipulating someone into doubting their own perception of reality. The term traces back to Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play *Gas Light* and its acclaimed 1944 film adaptation, but it spent decades in relative obscurity before political discourse and a viral Teen Vogue article pushed it into mainstream online vocabulary in 2016. After spawning the ironic "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss" meme in 2021, the word peaked when Merriam-Webster named it Word of the Year for 2022 following a 1,740% surge in dictionary lookups.

slang memessnowclone memesword of the year memessemantic drift memes

Overview

In online usage, gaslighting describes a behavior pattern where someone feeds another person false information to make them doubt their own memory, perception, or sanity. The word shows up in conversations about relationships, politics, workplace dynamics, and just about any situation where someone feels their reality is being deliberately distorted.

The term lives a double life on the internet. In serious contexts, it names a specific type of emotional abuse with real psychological consequences9. In meme culture, it fuels an entire genre of ironic humor, from self-aware relationship jokes to the wildly popular "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss" format. Mental health professionals have warned that loose application of the word is diluting its meaning, turning what was once a term for severe manipulation into shorthand for ordinary disagreements6.

British playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote *Gas Light* in 1938, a thriller set in 1880s London about a husband who systematically drives his wife insane in order to steal from her4. His primary tactic involves dimming the gas-powered lights in their home and then flatly denying any change when his wife notices the flickering9. A Broadway adaptation titled *Angel Street* ran for 1,295 performances, making it one of the longest-running non-musicals in Broadway history11.

A 1940 British film adaptation came first, but the 1944 American version directed by George Cukor made the story famous worldwide. Starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Joseph Cotten, the Hollywood *Gaslight* also launched Angela Lansbury's screen career4. The film earned seven Academy Award nominations, with Bergman winning Best Actress for her portrayal of a woman whose husband manipulates her into questioning everything she perceives8.

The word "gaslight" as a verb never actually appears in the play or either film2. According to Ben Yagoda at The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for the verb comes from a 1965 article in *The Reporter* magazine: "Some troubled persons having even gone so far as to charge malicious intent and premeditated 'gaslighting'"1. The quotation marks signal it was a recent coinage at the time.

Pop culture picked up the concept even earlier. Linguist Ben Zimmer traced a 1952 episode of *The Burns and Allen Show* where a character says "Give him the gaslight treatment!" and explains what it means1. A 1965 episode of *Gomer Pyle: USMC* contains what may be the earliest TV use of "gaslight" as an actual verb: "We'll gaslight him"1.

Origin & Background

Platform
Patrick Hamilton's play *Gas Light* (source term), Twitter / online political media (internet spread)
Key People
Patrick Hamilton
Date
1938 (play) / 2016 (internet mainstream)

British playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote *Gas Light* in 1938, a thriller set in 1880s London about a husband who systematically drives his wife insane in order to steal from her. His primary tactic involves dimming the gas-powered lights in their home and then flatly denying any change when his wife notices the flickering. A Broadway adaptation titled *Angel Street* ran for 1,295 performances, making it one of the longest-running non-musicals in Broadway history.

A 1940 British film adaptation came first, but the 1944 American version directed by George Cukor made the story famous worldwide. Starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Joseph Cotten, the Hollywood *Gaslight* also launched Angela Lansbury's screen career. The film earned seven Academy Award nominations, with Bergman winning Best Actress for her portrayal of a woman whose husband manipulates her into questioning everything she perceives.

The word "gaslight" as a verb never actually appears in the play or either film. According to Ben Yagoda at The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for the verb comes from a 1965 article in *The Reporter* magazine: "Some troubled persons having even gone so far as to charge malicious intent and premeditated 'gaslighting'". The quotation marks signal it was a recent coinage at the time.

Pop culture picked up the concept even earlier. Linguist Ben Zimmer traced a 1952 episode of *The Burns and Allen Show* where a character says "Give him the gaslight treatment!" and explains what it means. A 1965 episode of *Gomer Pyle: USMC* contains what may be the earliest TV use of "gaslight" as an actual verb: "We'll gaslight him".

How It Spread

For decades, gaslighting lived mostly in psychology and domestic abuse discussions. Robin Stern's 2007 book *The Gaslight Effect* gave the concept wider public visibility, defining gaslighting as "a form of emotional abuse that causes the survivor to question their memories, perceptions, and even their sanity". On May 31, 2009, the term was added to Urban Dictionary.

The real explosion came in December 2016. Teen Vogue published Lauren Duca's article "Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America," which framed Trump's habit of making statements and later denying them as textbook gaslighting. CNN, Salon, The New Republic, and The Texas Observer all ran parallel pieces using the same framework.

The American Dialect Society named "gaslight" its "Most Useful/Likely to Succeed" word of 2016. Some linguists pushed back. On the ADS email list, Arnold Zwicky pointed out the word had been around for "over seven decades," while the society maintained that nominees didn't need to be new, just "newly prominent or notable in the past year".

From 2017 onward, the term kept climbing across social media platforms. Oxford University Press named gaslighting a runner-up among its most popular new words of 2018. The June 2020 George Floyd protests and COVID-19 political tensions drove another wave of usage, with the word appearing frequently in discussions about police conduct and government communications.

How to Use This Meme

Gaslighting gets deployed in two main ways online:

Serious usage: Call out a situation where someone is deliberately distorting another person's sense of reality. This typically involves patterns like denying things that clearly happened, trivializing emotional reactions, or insisting someone is "imagining things." Common in discussions about abusive relationships, political deception, and workplace manipulation. Example: "My ex kept gaslighting me by denying he ever said things I clearly remember him saying."

Ironic/meme usage: Apply the term playfully or self-referentially, often through the "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss" format or relationship memes. The humor comes from using a serious psychological abuse term in absurdly trivial contexts. Example: "My cat is gaslighting me into thinking I didn't already feed her."

The term works as a verb ("to gaslight someone," "stop gaslighting me"), a gerund ("gaslighting in relationships"), and a general descriptor ("that's classic gaslighting").

Cultural Impact

The migration from film trivia to mainstream vocabulary happened with unusual speed. The American Dialect Society's 2016 recognition, Oxford's 2018 runner-up nod, and Merriam-Webster's 2022 Word of the Year designation gave gaslighting a rare triple crown of linguistic institutional attention.

In psychology, Robin Stern's 2007 book *The Gaslight Effect* outlined specific warning signs: constantly second-guessing yourself, making excuses for your partner's behavior, and feeling confused about your own perceptions. The book framed gaslighting not always as intentional cruelty but sometimes as a dynamic emerging from complex relationship patterns.

The 1944 film experienced renewed interest as the term gained popularity. Ingrid Bergman's performance is now routinely referenced in explainer articles about the concept. The line Joseph Cotten delivers to Bergman, "You're not going out of your mind. You're slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind," became a frequently shared quote in online discussions. In 2019, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Research has quantified how widespread the behaviors the term describes actually are. One study found that 48.3% of women and 48.8% of men reported experiencing psychological manipulation in intimate relationships, with seven out of ten women who experience emotional abuse developing symptoms of PTSD or depression.

Full History

*The New York Times* first printed the gerund "gaslighting" in a 1995 Maureen Dowd column, then used it only nine more times over the following twenty years. The word existed in print, but almost nobody outside of psychology, film history, or domestic violence advocacy circles used it regularly.

The 2016 political cycle ripped the term out of obscurity. After Teen Vogue's article circulated across Twitter, major publications adopted the gaslighting framework for covering political discourse. *The New York Times* used the word ten times between June and December 2016 alone, equaling its entire two-decade output in six months. Susan Dominus published an essay called "The Reverse-Gaslighting of Donald Trump," riffing on Hillary Clinton's debate line: "Donald, I know you live in your own reality".

The term's clinical background lent credibility to its popular adoption. A 1969 *Lancet* paper by Barton and Whitehead had described "the Gas Light phenomenon" in the context of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization used as a form of abuse. This was one of the earliest documented uses in medical literature. The American Psychological Association now considers gaslighting a colloquialism rather than a formal clinical term, though the manipulation tactics it describes align with recognized psychological concepts.

January 2021 brought the meme's most playful turn. On January 12, Tumblr user missnumber1111 posted "today's agenda: gaslight gatekeep and most importantly girlboss," collecting over 43,500 notes within a month. The next day, another user photoshopped "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art to read "Gaslight every moment, Gatekeep every day, Girlboss beyond words." The phrase jumped to Twitter and Instagram within days, turning the abuse-related term into ironic Gen Z shorthand.

This shift changed how people talked about gaslighting online. Instead of appearing only in serious discussions, the term became material for self-aware jokes and relationship humor. A March 2021 tweet reading "U can't gaslight me bc im okay wit being the villain" pulled over 200,000 likes. The boundary between sincere abuse awareness and comedic overstatement got very blurry.

Institutional recognition peaked in 2022. Merriam-Webster crowned gaslighting its Word of the Year after dictionary lookups jumped 1,740%. The dictionary's definition: "psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories".

Backlash grew alongside the popularity. Robin Stern, co-founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, said: "Gaslighting is often used in an accusatory way when somebody may just be insistent on something, or somebody may be trying to influence you. That's not what gaslighting is". What once described manipulation severe enough to justify psychiatric commitment was now being lobbed at partners who simply remembered a conversation differently.

Fun Facts

The word "gaslight" as a verb never appears in the 1938 play, the 1940 British film, or the 1944 American film that inspired the term.

Ben Zimmer of the American Dialect Society tracked the earliest TV reference to a 1952 episode of *The Burns and Allen Show*, where a character says "Give him the gaslight treatment!" and then explains the concept.

Merriam-Webster reported a 1,740% increase in lookups for "gaslighting" in 2022, the year it was named Word of the Year.

Jonathan Lighter, editor of *The Historical Dictionary of American Slang*, traced an oral use of the verb to 1956 from none other than his own mother.

The 1944 film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2019.

Derivatives & Variations

Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss:

A parody of "Live, Laugh, Love" that originated on Tumblr in January 2021, quickly spreading to Twitter and Instagram as ironic shorthand mocking empowerment culture[5].

Reverse gaslighting:

A concept explored in Susan Dominus's *New York Times* essay, describing the dynamic of insisting someone is lying when they may genuinely believe what they're saying[1].

"There's no such thing as gaslighting":

A meta-joke format where the humor IS gaslighting, telling someone the concept doesn't exist. Urban Dictionary features a self-referential definition in this style[12].

Frequently Asked Questions

Gaslighting

1938Internet slang / catchphraseclassic

Also known as: Gaslight · The Gaslight Treatment

Gaslighting is internet slang for psychological manipulation from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play that went mainstream in 2016, became 2022 Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year, and inspired "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss.

Gaslighting is internet slang for psychologically manipulating someone into doubting their own perception of reality. The term traces back to Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play *Gas Light* and its acclaimed 1944 film adaptation, but it spent decades in relative obscurity before political discourse and a viral Teen Vogue article pushed it into mainstream online vocabulary in 2016. After spawning the ironic "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss" meme in 2021, the word peaked when Merriam-Webster named it Word of the Year for 2022 following a 1,740% surge in dictionary lookups.

slang memes snowclone memes word of the year memes semantic drift memes

Overview

In online usage, gaslighting describes a behavior pattern where someone feeds another person false information to make them doubt their own memory, perception, or sanity. The word shows up in conversations about relationships, politics, workplace dynamics, and just about any situation where someone feels their reality is being deliberately distorted.

The term lives a double life on the internet. In serious contexts, it names a specific type of emotional abuse with real psychological consequences. In meme culture, it fuels an entire genre of ironic humor, from self-aware relationship jokes to the wildly popular "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss" format. Mental health professionals have warned that loose application of the word is diluting its meaning, turning what was once a term for severe manipulation into shorthand for ordinary disagreements.

British playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote *Gas Light* in 1938, a thriller set in 1880s London about a husband who systematically drives his wife insane in order to steal from her. His primary tactic involves dimming the gas-powered lights in their home and then flatly denying any change when his wife notices the flickering. A Broadway adaptation titled *Angel Street* ran for 1,295 performances, making it one of the longest-running non-musicals in Broadway history.

A 1940 British film adaptation came first, but the 1944 American version directed by George Cukor made the story famous worldwide. Starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Joseph Cotten, the Hollywood *Gaslight* also launched Angela Lansbury's screen career. The film earned seven Academy Award nominations, with Bergman winning Best Actress for her portrayal of a woman whose husband manipulates her into questioning everything she perceives.

The word "gaslight" as a verb never actually appears in the play or either film. According to Ben Yagoda at The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for the verb comes from a 1965 article in *The Reporter* magazine: "Some troubled persons having even gone so far as to charge malicious intent and premeditated 'gaslighting'". The quotation marks signal it was a recent coinage at the time.

Pop culture picked up the concept even earlier. Linguist Ben Zimmer traced a 1952 episode of *The Burns and Allen Show* where a character says "Give him the gaslight treatment!" and explains what it means. A 1965 episode of *Gomer Pyle: USMC* contains what may be the earliest TV use of "gaslight" as an actual verb: "We'll gaslight him".

Origin & Background

Platform
Patrick Hamilton's play *Gas Light* (source term), Twitter / online political media (internet spread)
Key People
Patrick Hamilton
Date
1938 (play) / 2016 (internet mainstream)

British playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote *Gas Light* in 1938, a thriller set in 1880s London about a husband who systematically drives his wife insane in order to steal from her. His primary tactic involves dimming the gas-powered lights in their home and then flatly denying any change when his wife notices the flickering. A Broadway adaptation titled *Angel Street* ran for 1,295 performances, making it one of the longest-running non-musicals in Broadway history.

A 1940 British film adaptation came first, but the 1944 American version directed by George Cukor made the story famous worldwide. Starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Joseph Cotten, the Hollywood *Gaslight* also launched Angela Lansbury's screen career. The film earned seven Academy Award nominations, with Bergman winning Best Actress for her portrayal of a woman whose husband manipulates her into questioning everything she perceives.

The word "gaslight" as a verb never actually appears in the play or either film. According to Ben Yagoda at The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for the verb comes from a 1965 article in *The Reporter* magazine: "Some troubled persons having even gone so far as to charge malicious intent and premeditated 'gaslighting'". The quotation marks signal it was a recent coinage at the time.

Pop culture picked up the concept even earlier. Linguist Ben Zimmer traced a 1952 episode of *The Burns and Allen Show* where a character says "Give him the gaslight treatment!" and explains what it means. A 1965 episode of *Gomer Pyle: USMC* contains what may be the earliest TV use of "gaslight" as an actual verb: "We'll gaslight him".

How It Spread

For decades, gaslighting lived mostly in psychology and domestic abuse discussions. Robin Stern's 2007 book *The Gaslight Effect* gave the concept wider public visibility, defining gaslighting as "a form of emotional abuse that causes the survivor to question their memories, perceptions, and even their sanity". On May 31, 2009, the term was added to Urban Dictionary.

The real explosion came in December 2016. Teen Vogue published Lauren Duca's article "Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America," which framed Trump's habit of making statements and later denying them as textbook gaslighting. CNN, Salon, The New Republic, and The Texas Observer all ran parallel pieces using the same framework.

The American Dialect Society named "gaslight" its "Most Useful/Likely to Succeed" word of 2016. Some linguists pushed back. On the ADS email list, Arnold Zwicky pointed out the word had been around for "over seven decades," while the society maintained that nominees didn't need to be new, just "newly prominent or notable in the past year".

From 2017 onward, the term kept climbing across social media platforms. Oxford University Press named gaslighting a runner-up among its most popular new words of 2018. The June 2020 George Floyd protests and COVID-19 political tensions drove another wave of usage, with the word appearing frequently in discussions about police conduct and government communications.

How to Use This Meme

Gaslighting gets deployed in two main ways online:

Serious usage: Call out a situation where someone is deliberately distorting another person's sense of reality. This typically involves patterns like denying things that clearly happened, trivializing emotional reactions, or insisting someone is "imagining things." Common in discussions about abusive relationships, political deception, and workplace manipulation. Example: "My ex kept gaslighting me by denying he ever said things I clearly remember him saying."

Ironic/meme usage: Apply the term playfully or self-referentially, often through the "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss" format or relationship memes. The humor comes from using a serious psychological abuse term in absurdly trivial contexts. Example: "My cat is gaslighting me into thinking I didn't already feed her."

The term works as a verb ("to gaslight someone," "stop gaslighting me"), a gerund ("gaslighting in relationships"), and a general descriptor ("that's classic gaslighting").

Cultural Impact

The migration from film trivia to mainstream vocabulary happened with unusual speed. The American Dialect Society's 2016 recognition, Oxford's 2018 runner-up nod, and Merriam-Webster's 2022 Word of the Year designation gave gaslighting a rare triple crown of linguistic institutional attention.

In psychology, Robin Stern's 2007 book *The Gaslight Effect* outlined specific warning signs: constantly second-guessing yourself, making excuses for your partner's behavior, and feeling confused about your own perceptions. The book framed gaslighting not always as intentional cruelty but sometimes as a dynamic emerging from complex relationship patterns.

The 1944 film experienced renewed interest as the term gained popularity. Ingrid Bergman's performance is now routinely referenced in explainer articles about the concept. The line Joseph Cotten delivers to Bergman, "You're not going out of your mind. You're slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind," became a frequently shared quote in online discussions. In 2019, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Research has quantified how widespread the behaviors the term describes actually are. One study found that 48.3% of women and 48.8% of men reported experiencing psychological manipulation in intimate relationships, with seven out of ten women who experience emotional abuse developing symptoms of PTSD or depression.

Full History

*The New York Times* first printed the gerund "gaslighting" in a 1995 Maureen Dowd column, then used it only nine more times over the following twenty years. The word existed in print, but almost nobody outside of psychology, film history, or domestic violence advocacy circles used it regularly.

The 2016 political cycle ripped the term out of obscurity. After Teen Vogue's article circulated across Twitter, major publications adopted the gaslighting framework for covering political discourse. *The New York Times* used the word ten times between June and December 2016 alone, equaling its entire two-decade output in six months. Susan Dominus published an essay called "The Reverse-Gaslighting of Donald Trump," riffing on Hillary Clinton's debate line: "Donald, I know you live in your own reality".

The term's clinical background lent credibility to its popular adoption. A 1969 *Lancet* paper by Barton and Whitehead had described "the Gas Light phenomenon" in the context of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization used as a form of abuse. This was one of the earliest documented uses in medical literature. The American Psychological Association now considers gaslighting a colloquialism rather than a formal clinical term, though the manipulation tactics it describes align with recognized psychological concepts.

January 2021 brought the meme's most playful turn. On January 12, Tumblr user missnumber1111 posted "today's agenda: gaslight gatekeep and most importantly girlboss," collecting over 43,500 notes within a month. The next day, another user photoshopped "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art to read "Gaslight every moment, Gatekeep every day, Girlboss beyond words." The phrase jumped to Twitter and Instagram within days, turning the abuse-related term into ironic Gen Z shorthand.

This shift changed how people talked about gaslighting online. Instead of appearing only in serious discussions, the term became material for self-aware jokes and relationship humor. A March 2021 tweet reading "U can't gaslight me bc im okay wit being the villain" pulled over 200,000 likes. The boundary between sincere abuse awareness and comedic overstatement got very blurry.

Institutional recognition peaked in 2022. Merriam-Webster crowned gaslighting its Word of the Year after dictionary lookups jumped 1,740%. The dictionary's definition: "psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories".

Backlash grew alongside the popularity. Robin Stern, co-founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, said: "Gaslighting is often used in an accusatory way when somebody may just be insistent on something, or somebody may be trying to influence you. That's not what gaslighting is". What once described manipulation severe enough to justify psychiatric commitment was now being lobbed at partners who simply remembered a conversation differently.

Fun Facts

The word "gaslight" as a verb never appears in the 1938 play, the 1940 British film, or the 1944 American film that inspired the term.

Ben Zimmer of the American Dialect Society tracked the earliest TV reference to a 1952 episode of *The Burns and Allen Show*, where a character says "Give him the gaslight treatment!" and then explains the concept.

Merriam-Webster reported a 1,740% increase in lookups for "gaslighting" in 2022, the year it was named Word of the Year.

Jonathan Lighter, editor of *The Historical Dictionary of American Slang*, traced an oral use of the verb to 1956 from none other than his own mother.

The 1944 film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2019.

Derivatives & Variations

Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss:

A parody of "Live, Laugh, Love" that originated on Tumblr in January 2021, quickly spreading to Twitter and Instagram as ironic shorthand mocking empowerment culture[5].

Reverse gaslighting:

A concept explored in Susan Dominus's *New York Times* essay, describing the dynamic of insisting someone is lying when they may genuinely believe what they're saying[1].

"There's no such thing as gaslighting":

A meta-joke format where the humor IS gaslighting, telling someone the concept doesn't exist. Urban Dictionary features a self-referential definition in this style[12].

Frequently Asked Questions