[imagesource: jenikirbyhistory.com]

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was introduced to the world more than 80 years ago in a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton.

The play birthed two film adaptations in the 1940s, one being George Cukor’s Gaslight starring Ingrid Bergman as the titular wife being gaslit by her husband who convinced her that the dimming gaslights in their apartment were a figment of her troubled mind.

Can you guess what 2022’s word is?

Yup, gaslighting has been thrown into the spotlight once again as governments, the media, and abusive partners are being increasingly called out for this manipulation tactic.

Even though there hasn’t been one single event that drove significant spikes in the curiosity about what gaslighting means – as it usually goes with the chosen word of the year, The Guardian notes – lookups for the word on the online dictionary increased 1 740% in 2022 from the previous year.

Indeed, gaslighting has been overall pervasive:

“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,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, in an exclusive interview with the Associated Press ahead of Monday’s unveiling.

Image: Merriam-Webster / AP

“It was a word looked up frequently every single day of the year,” he said.

The heinous tool can be used by abusers in relationships, politicians and other newsmakers, as a corporate tactic, or as a way to mislead the public or a family or friend.

When a healthcare professional dismisses a patient’s symptoms or illness as “all in your head”, that is referred to as “medical gaslighting”.

After the Ingrid Bergman movie, per HuffPost, mental health practitioners adopted the term to clinically describe a form of prolonged coercive control in abusive relationships.

Since the 1990s, “gaslight” has gained more casual use outside of psychology, being used in contexts of social and political matters.

Now, in the era of rampant wealth corruption, fake news, deepfakes, artificial intelligence, Donald Trump’s politics, and Elon Musk’s Twitter, gaslighting has been felt by almost everyone in the world.

Merriam-Webster chooses its word of the year based solely on data. Runner-ups for the top-searched terms of 2022 included “oligarch“, “omicron”, “codify“, “queen consort“, “raid“, “sentient“, “cancel culture“, “LGBTQIA“, and “loamy“.

The previous three words of the year have been “vaccine”, “pandemic”, and “they”.

[sources:guardian&huffpost]