# ghosting

> English word · Noun · frequency rank #51,724

## Definitions
1. The practice of hiding prisoners from inspection from (possibly hostile) outside inspectors.
2. The blurry appearance of a television picture resulting from interference caused by multipath reception.
3. Ghost imaging.
4. 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.
5. A problem with a keyboard where certain simultaneous keypresses trigger the action of a further key that was not in fact pressed.
6. A method of ending a personal relationship by stopping any contact with the other party and not providing an explanation.
7. The phenomenon of the writing on one side of a page in a notebook being partly visible on the other side.
8. The act or habit of exhaling vape smoke slowly, to prevent others from noticing.

## Etymology
From ghost + -ing.

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/ghosting