Gaslighting took its name from a Victorian stage thriller about flickering lamps
In a 1938 London play, a husband searching the attic for jewels makes the house lamps dim, then tells his wife she is imagining it. That plot gave English a word for bending someone's grip on reality, and by 2022 Merriam-Webster had crowned it Word of the Year.
Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light was filmed in Britain in 1940 and remade in Hollywood in 1944. Its mechanism is precise: when a lamp is lit in one room, the gas pressure drops and the other lights fade. The wife notices, the servants insist nobody else is home, and her husband uses her doubt to persuade her she is losing her mind so he can take her fortune.
The verb came later. Its first recorded use dates to 1961, and Maureen Dowd introduced it to The New York Times in 1995, after which the paper printed it only nine times across two decades. Then it exploded. The American Dialect Society chose gaslight as the most useful new word of 2016, and Oxford University Press listed it as a runner-up in 2018.
In its original sense the term was severe. The American Psychological Association noted in 2021 that it once described manipulation extreme enough to drive a victim toward an asylum. Clinical case reports fit that pattern: in 1977 Lund and Gardiner described an elderly woman repeatedly committed for psychosis whose symptoms vanished on admission, because staff at her retirement home had been engineering her paranoia. Today the APA still treats the word as a colloquialism rather than a diagnosis.
Its popularity has created a backlash. Robin Stern of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence points out that someone who simply insists or tries to persuade is not gaslighting. The Washington Post called it therapy speak in 2022, and some experts worry that stretching it to cover ordinary arguments makes the genuine pattern, a sustained campaign by a more powerful party to override another person's perceptions, harder to spot. A related informal term, medical gaslighting, describes real symptoms being brushed aside by clinicians, a problem that falls more often on women.
Source: Gaslighting
