ghosting

Noun

ghosting (countable and uncountable, plural ghostings)

1. (colloquial) A method of ending a personal relationship by stopping any contact with the other party and not providing an explanation.
   • Stories of ghosting often deal with broken-off romances, but ghosting can end a friendship as well.
   • They probed participants’ experiences with ghosting from the perspective of both the ghoster and the ghostee.2019 March 11, Vinita Mehta, “The Anatomy of Ghosting”, in Psychology Today, archived from the original on 09 Dec 2025
2. The blurry appearance of a television picture resulting from interference caused by multipath reception.
3. 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.
4. The phenomenon of the writing on one side of a page in a notebook being partly visible on the other side.
   • Near-synonyms: bleed-through, bleeding, print-through

   Synonyms:

   bleed-through, bleeding, print-through

5. Ghost imaging.
6. The practice of hiding prisoners from inspection by outside inspectors.
   • Their hastily fabricated Potemkin village was practically deserted, what with all the ghosting.
7. (slang) The act or habit of exhaling vape smoke slowly, to prevent others from noticing.
8. A problem with a keyboard where certain simultaneous keypresses trigger the action of a further key that was not in fact pressed.
   • 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.2011, John St. Clair, Project Arcade: Build Your Own Arcade Machine, page 218