What it means
To gaslight someone is to mess with their head so steadily that they start doubting their own memory and sanity. You deny things that happened, twist the story, insist they are imagining it, until they no longer trust what they saw with their own eyes. Slow, deliberate, and nasty.
Usage examples
"He’d hide my keys then tell me I’d lost them again, week after week, full on gaslight until I doubted everything."
"Don’t let them gaslight you, you were there, you saw what happened, trust your own memory."
"Every time I brought up what he said, he swore it never happened and called me dramatic. Classic gaslight, had me questioning my own diary."
"She kept receipts, screenshots, the whole lot, and he still tried to gaslight her like none of it ever happened."
"Nah, that’s not you being forgetful, that’s him gaslighting you till your brain starts doing backflips."
Where it comes from
It comes from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, then the film versions made it stick in people’s heads. In the story, a man keeps dimming the gas lights and denying it, trying to make his wife doubt what she sees. That title slowly turned into the everyday verb gaslight.
Other ways to say it
Editors of this term
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