Merriam-Webster Chooses 'Gaslighting' As 'Word Of The Year 2022'

Lookups for the word increased 1740% year-over-year from 2021, the dictionary said.

New Delhi: In 2022, the Merriam-Webster dictionary selected "gaslighting", meaning mind-manipulating, grossly misleading, and downright deceitful as its word of the year. 

Lookups for the word increased 1740% year-over-year from 2021, the dictionary said. “It was a word looked up frequently every single day of the year,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large. But there wasn’t a single event that drove significant spikes in curiosity, as it usually goes with the chosen word of the year, stated the news agency Associated Press.

The gaslighting was pervasive.

Sokolowski in an interview with the Associated Press said, “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.” 

The dictionary's top definition for gaslighting is the 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 and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

Gaslighting can be termed as a tool frequently used by abusers in relationships and even by politicians and other newsmakers.

The term gaslighting was later used by mental health practitioners to clinically describe a form of prolonged coercive control in abusive relationships.

“There is this implication of an intentional deception,” Sokolowski said, as quoted by AP. “And once one is aware of that deception, it’s not just a straightforward lie, as in, you know, I didn’t eat the cookies in the cookie jar. It’s something that has a little bit more devious quality to it. It has possibly an idea of strategy or a long-term plan,” he added.

The news agency stated that the word "gaslighting" was brought to life more than 80 years ago with “Gas Light,” a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton.

Merriam-Webster, which logs 100 million pageviews a month on its site, chooses its word of the year based solely on data. Sokolowski and his team weed out evergreen words most commonly looked up to gauge which word received a significant bump over the year before, the AP reported.