The article circulated on platforms like Twitter going the rest of December 2016 and into January 2017. It centered on statements made by former President Trump in which he'd later backtrack on when criticized, stating instead that he never said them. On December 10th, 2016, Teen Vogue published an article titled, "Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America," which made the term more mainstream. Over the course of 12 years, the video received roughly 6,600 likes (shown below). On May 31st, 2009, the term "gaslighting" was added to Urban Dictionary by the user Your Reality Check. It continued to be used in discourse going into the 2000s. the quote reads, “Some troubled persons having even gone so far as to charge malicious intent and premeditated ‘gaslighting.’” Additionally, Yagoda noted in his article, written on January 12th, 2017, that the verb was being used in an episode of I Love Lucy from 1965.īy the 1990s, the term became associated with domestic abuse language. The word "gaslight's" first citation according to the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1965 article in the magazine The Reporter. In 1944, an American movie adaptation was made and directed by George Cukor (official trailer from YouTube shown below).Īccording to Ben Yagoda, a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, the verb "gaslight" was never used in the original play and only manifested as a term in the 1960s. The main lie he reiterates to his wife is by insisting that the gaslights in their house do not flicker, when in fact they do. In 1938, British novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote the thriller play Gas Light: a story about a marriage based on deceit and trickery when the husband committed to driving his wife insane in order to steal from her.