ghosting

1. 1
   nouncolloquialuncountable

   The practice of ending a personal relationship by suddenly stopping all contact and giving no explanation.

   He blamed work stress for his ghosting of someone he had dated for months.

   Counselors say ghosting often leaves lasting anxiety in the person who was abandoned.

   Note

   Romance is its home ground, but the word is not confined there. Friend ghosting names the same silent exit from a friendship. It is a colloquial word, natural in conversation and in casual writing. As a noun it takes of for the person left behind, as in his ghosting of her, and a qualifier such as friend in front narrows which kind of tie is meant.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of ghost.

   They started ghosting clients who asked too many questions.

   Critics accused the company of ghosting its most loyal customers.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs here. After be it forms the progressive, as in the memory kept ghosting him. In noun positions it works as a gerund, as in ghosting the file took minutes. Behind it stand the verb's literary "haunt" sense, its figurative "trouble" sense, a slang sense meaning "kill", and the computing senses "copy a file" and "gray out an option".

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The blurry appearance of a television picture caused by interference from signals that reach the antenna by more than one path.

   The technician traced the ghosting to reflections off a nearby tower.

   Analog sets often showed ghosting in areas crowded with tall buildings.

   Note

   Engineers call the cause multipath reception. The same broadcast arrives once directly and again after bouncing off a tower or building, and the delayed copy lands slightly to one side of the original. The result is a faint double, a "ghost" trailing the main picture. The word belongs mainly to analog sets and names the visible symptom on the screen, not the reflected signal itself.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   A keyboard problem in which certain simultaneous keypresses trigger the action of an additional key that was never actually pressed.

   Gamers avoid ghosting by choosing keyboards built to handle many simultaneous presses.

   The reviewer tested for ghosting by holding down several keys at once.

   Note

   The fault comes from how keys are wired: each one sits where a row and a column of a grid cross. When three pressed keys mark three corners of a rectangle, the circuit can read the fourth corner as pressed too. John St. Clair's Project Arcade (2011) pairs it with blocking, the opposite failure, in which a real keypress is ignored. Keyboards sold as anti-ghosting are built to avoid the phantom key.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   The phenomenon of writing on one side of a notebook page being partly visible through to the other side.

   Fountain pen users complain about ghosting in cheaper notebooks.

   The journal's thick paper prevented any ghosting from heavy ink.

   Similarshow-through

6. 6
   noununcountable

   A form of identity theft in which someone assumes the identity, and sometimes the social role, of a specific dead person who is not widely known to have died.

   Investigators linked the pension scam to ghosting of recently deceased claimants.

   Ghosting let the impostor collect a dead stranger's mail and benefits for months.

7. 7
   noununcountable

   The process of cloning the entire contents of a computer's drive to create an identical image for backup or mass deployment.

   Administrators rely on ghosting to deploy a standard setup across an entire lab.

   After ghosting the master drive, they restored each machine from the saved image.

   Similarcloning, imaging

   Note

   Computing shortens ghost imaging to one word. The noun sits beside the verb ghost in its sense "to copy a file or record". The copy itself is called the image, and ghosting is the act of making it or restoring from it. Keep it apart from the keyboard fault, a different computing ghosting in which nothing is copied at all.

8. 8
   nounslanguncountable

   The act or habit of exhaling vapor slowly so that others do not notice it.

   Vapers use ghosting to stay discreet in places where vaping is banned.

   His ghosting was so subtle that no one at the table noticed.

   Note

   A trick named for what it leaves behind, which is almost nothing. The vapor is let out so gradually that little or no cloud forms, so the user can vape unnoticed where a plume would draw attention. It is slang and at home among vapers. Outside that circle, listeners will more readily hear the relationship sense, so the context should make the vaping plain.

9. 9
   noununcountable

   The practice of concealing prisoners from outside inspectors, including potentially hostile ones, so that their detention goes unrecorded.

   Human rights monitors documented ghosting at several undisclosed sites.

   Ghosting allowed the facility to deny holding the missing men.

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