![]() The article "Gaslighting: A Marital Syndrome" (1988) examines certain male behaviors during and after their extramarital affairs, as well as the effect of those behaviors and associated attitudes on the men's spouses. "Gaslighting" is occasionally used in clinical literature but is considered a colloquialism by the American Psychological Association. Oxford University Press named gaslighting as a runner-up in their list of the most popular new words of 2018. ![]() ![]() The American Dialect Society recognized the word gaslight as the "most useful" new word of the year in 2016. However, there were only nine additional uses in the following twenty years. The New York Times first used the common gerund form, gaslighting, in Maureen Dowd's 1995 column. ![]() The term is now defined in Merriam-Webster as "to make someone question their reality". According to the American Psychological Association, it "once referred to manipulation so extreme as to induce mental illness or to justify commitment of the gaslighted person to a psychiatric institution but is now used more generally". Gaslighting was largely an obscure or esoteric term until the mid-2010s, when it broadly seeped into English lexicon. The term "gaslighting" derives from the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a husband uses trickery to convince his wife that she is mentally unwell so he can steal from her. Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten in the 1944 film Gaslight
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