The terms
A working glossary of modern dating words — ghosting, orbiting, soft launch, benching and the rest — each defined in plain language, with what it looks like in practice.
Section last updated
- dating termsglossary
Modern dating vocabulary describes patterns of behaviour, not types of people. Each entry in this glossary gives one term a short, self-contained definition — what it means, how it is used, and what it looks like in practice — so you can tell it apart from the terms that sit next to it.
often confused with ghostingorbiting and haunting
What this section covers
Modern dating terms are words that name a pattern of behaviour, not a type of person. A word is useful when it lets you describe something you could not describe before, and useless when it is only a label to put on someone. Every entry in this section is written the first way: what the word means, where it came from, how it is used, and what it looks like from the receiving end.
In brief: this is a working glossary. Each term gets a short, self-contained definition so you can tell it apart from the terms sitting next to it.
Which of these words are actually in the dictionary?
Fewer than you would guess, and the difference matters. Ghosting has a full dictionary entry: Dictionary.com defines it as “the practice of suddenly ending all contact with a person without explanation, often in a dating or romantic relationship”. Soft launch has one too, in its relationship sense (Dictionary.com, 2026). Others — benching, orbiting, zombieing, breadcrumbing — appear only in an editorial dating-slang glossary (Dictionary.com's dating-slang glossary), which is a publisher describing usage rather than a dictionary accepting a word. Some, such as delusionship, have no dictionary status at all, and the pages here say so.
How widely are these words known?
Unevenly, and that gap is itself the reason the section exists. 62% of US adults said they had heard of “ghosting” (Pew Research Center, 2020) and 89% had heard of “friends with benefits” (Pew Research Center, 2020), while only 9% had heard of “breadcrumbing” (Pew Research Center, 2020). A word that one person treats as ordinary vocabulary and the other has never met is a bad basis for a conversation about what is happening between them.
| Term | Had heard of it | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Friends with benefits | 89% | Pew Research Center (2020) |
| Catfishing | 63% | Pew Research Center (2020) |
| Ghosting | 62% | Pew Research Center (2020) |
| Breadcrumbing | 9% | Pew Research Center (2020) |
Each figure above, with its exact question wording and base, is on the statistics page.
What these pages will not do
They will not turn a word into a verdict about a person. Benching, for instance, refers to keeping someone on hold in case other options do not work out — that describes an observable pattern of contact, and it says nothing certain about intent. None of these terms is a diagnosis, and no page here treats one as though it were.
Pages in this section
Addenda
New entries, when there are new entriesn.
A short note sent when a word is added to this reference, or when an existing entry changes because the evidence behind it changed. There is no schedule and none is promised: a reference book does not publish on Tuesdays.
That did not go through, and nothing was saved. Try the address again, or write to us from the contact page.
The address is stored to send that note and nothing else. An unsubscribe link is in every one.