ghosted

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of ghost.

   After weeks of silence, she realized he had ghosted her completely.

   The recruiter ghosted every applicant who missed the first deadline.

   Note

   One spelling does double duty, as with any regular verb. It is the simple past in the spirit ghosted the old house, and the past participle with have in the perfect or with be in the passive. The form carries the whole range of its parent verb: a literary haunting, a figurative troubling of the mind, slang for killing, copying a file, and graying out an unavailable option on a screen.

2. 2
   adjective

   Written by an uncredited author and published under the name of another person.

   Critics suspected the autobiography was ghosted rather than penned by the athlete himself.

   The publisher specialized in ghosted business books for busy executives.

   Similarghostwritten

   Note

   A publishing word with a narrow reach: it describes articles and published opinions written by someone other than the person whose name they carry. It takes no degrees. A column is ghosted or it is not, never more ghosted. It sits naturally before a noun (a ghosted op-ed) and pairs with its fuller synonym, ghostwritten, which is the safer choice when the dating sense of the past form of ghost might confuse.

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