gaslight

Formsgaslights, gaslighting, gaslighted

Pluralgaslights

1. 1
   verbformalhistoricaltransitive

   To manipulate someone into doubting their own memory, perception of reality, or sanity, typically with harmful intent.

   For years her husband gaslighted her, moving her keys and then insisting she had lost them.

   "You're gaslighting me, for chrissakes."

   1964, in an argument between the characters Jenny and Charley in William Goldman's novel Boys and Girls Together

   Similarmanipulate

   Note

   The verb comes from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gas Light and its film versions, in which a husband works to convince his wife she is going insane by altering small things around her. Early uses from the 1960s still put it in quotation marks and explain it. The past form is either gaslighted or gaslit.

2. 2
   verbhistoricaltransitive

   To deceive or trick someone, or to lie to them.

   Honestly, that trailer gaslit everyone into thinking it was a horror movie.

   Online sellers gaslight shoppers with fake 'only two left' warnings all the time.

   Similardeceive, trick, fool, dupe

   Note

   A loose use that stretches the word to any lie or trick, with no attempt to make someone doubt their own mind. It is informal and widely objected to, because it blurs the strict meaning of deliberate manipulation. In careful writing, deceive, trick or lie to says this more plainly and keeps the stronger word for when it is earned.

3. 3
   nounhistoricalcountable or uncountable

   A lamp that burns illuminating gas, or town gas, supplied through pipes.

   The old theater still has its original gaslights fixed along the walls.

   He was renovated and refreshed, his soul was strengthened, and his countenance waxed cheerful, and he began to feel like himself again, under the brown canopy of metropolitan smoke, and among the cabs and gaslights.

   [1871], J[oseph] Sheridan Le Fanu, “Captain Lake Looks in at Nightfall”

   Note

   A word for a lamp of the past, named simply from gas and light. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's London of 1871 is all cabs and gaslights, and a 1904 health manual warns that gaslights burn up a room's oxygen along with their fuel. American English usually calls the lamp a gas lamp.

4. 4
   nounhistoricaluncountable

   The light given off by the burning gas in a lamp fed with piped illuminating gas.

   She read the letter by gaslight, squinting at the faded ink.

   Then as the darkness descended, they began to shine with the mellow radiance of gaslight.

   1953, Henry Maxwell, “Abandoned Railway Stations”

   Note

   The glow itself rather than the fixture, and so used without a or a plural. Its natural home is the phrase by gaslight, the way people read and worked after dark: Horatio Alger's narrator in 1887 no longer dares to use his strained eyes by gaslight. Writers still reach for it to give a scene a soft, period yellow.

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