The act of suddenly stopping all communication with someone, usually in a dating context, without explanation or goodbye.
From 'ghost' + '-ing' suffix. The term emerged in the 2010s as smartphones and instant messaging made it possible to vanish from someone's life digitally overnight.
Ghosting is so modern that it barely existed before 2010, yet by 2020 dictionaries added it as a formal word—it's one of the fastest adoptions of slang into official English, showing how dating apps reshaped human behavior.
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