Word.ws English Dictionary

phantom energy

phantom energy noun: the energy that is lost due to standby electronic activity of equipment that is "off", on standby or sleep mode.

Noun (1)

phantom energy (uncountable)

  1. (energy efficiency) The energy that is lost due to standby electronic activity of equipment that is "off", on standby or sleep mode.

Noun (2)

phantom energy (uncountable)

  1. A category of dark energy, where dark energy is not fixed in amount nor in density, and continuously increases over time.

Origin of phantom energy

From phantom + energy.

Coined by physicist Robert R. Caldwell in 1998, in reference to the Star Wars movie The Phantom Menace, in his paper "A Phantom Menace? Cosmological consequences of a dark energy component with super-negative equation of state" referring to the "phantom energy menace" that would lead to the Big Rip.

Questions about phantom energy

What does phantom energy mean?
Phantom energy means the energy that is lost due to standby electronic activity of equipment that is "off", on standby or sleep mode.
What part of speech is phantom energy?
Phantom energy is a noun.

Words near phantom energy in the dictionary

  1. phantom circuits
  2. phantom crane flies
  3. phantom crane fly
  4. phantom debt
  5. phantom debts
  6. phantom energy
  7. phantom eye syndrome
  8. phantom goal
  9. phantom goals
  10. phantom island
  11. phantom islands

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: phantom energy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “phantom energy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/phantom_energy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.