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ghosting

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

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English

Etymology

From ghost +‎ -ing.

Pronunciation

Noun

ghosting (countable and uncountable, plural ghostings)

  1. The practice of hiding prisoners from inspection from (possibly hostile) outside inspectors.
  2. (electronics, television) The blurry appearance of a television picture resulting from interference caused by multipath reception.
  3. (computing) Ghost imaging.
  4. A form of identity theft in which someone steals the identity, and sometimes even the role within society, of a specific dead person (the "ghost") who is not widely known to be deceased.
  5. (computing) A problem with a keyboard where certain simultaneous keypresses trigger the action of a further key that was not in fact pressed.
    • 2011, John St. Clair, Project Arcade: Build Your Own Arcade Machine, page 218:
      Examine your matrix map, and make sure that no three keystrokes form a rectangle with a fourth keystroke that will cause you problems. This prevents both ghosting and blocking.
  7. (colloquial) A method of ending a personal relationship by stopping any contact with the other party and not providing an explanation. [from 2000s]
    Stories of ghosting often deal with broken-off romances, but it's worth mentioning that friend ghosting is real, and sometimes necessary.
    • 2019 March 11, Vinita Mehta, “The Anatomy of Ghosting”, in Psychology Today‎, archived from the original on 9 December 2025:
      They probed participants’ experiences with ghosting from the perspective of both the ghoster and the ghostee.
  8. The phenomenon of the writing on one side of a page in a notebook being partly visible on the other side.
  9. (slang) The act or habit of exhaling vape smoke slowly, to prevent others from noticing.

Translations

See also

Verb

ghosting

  1. present participle and gerund of ghost

Further reading

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