ghost vs ghosting

ghost

noun
  • A dead person whose identity is stolen by another. See ghosting. 

  • A formerly nonexistent character that was at some point mistakenly encoded into a character set standard, which might have since become used opportunistically for some genuine purpose. 

  • Remnant; the remains of a(n). 

  • Perceived or listed but not real. 

  • Abandoned. 

  • A covert (and deniable) agent. 

  • Transparent or translucent. 

  • An unwanted image similar to and overlapping or adjacent to the main one on a television screen, caused by the transmitted image being received both directly and via reflection. 

  • Of cryptid, supernatural or extraterrestrial nature. 

  • White or pale. 

  • A game in which players take turns to add a letter to a possible word, trying not to complete a word. 

  • Substitute. 

  • A nonexistent person invented to obtain some fraudulent benefit. 

  • An understudy. 

  • The disembodied soul; the soul or spirit of a deceased person; a spirit appearing after death. 

  • Someone whose identity cannot be established because there are no records of him/her. 

  • An image of a file or hard disk. 

  • Any faint shadowy semblance; an unsubstantial image. 

  • A false image formed in a telescope, camera, or other optical device by reflection from the surfaces of one or more lenses. 

  • The faint image that remains after an attempt to remove graffiti. 

  • An opponent in a racing game that follows a previously recorded route, allowing players to compete against previous best times. 

  • An unresponsive user on IRC, resulting from the user's client disconnecting without notifying the server. 

  • A ghostwriter. 

  • An unphysical state in a gauge theory. 

verb
  • To copy a file or hard drive image. 

  • To provide the speaking or singing voice for another actor, who is lip-syncing. 

  • To forcibly disconnect an IRC user who is using one's reserved nickname. 

  • To gray out (a visual item) to indicate that it is unavailable. 

  • To perform an act of ghosting: to break up with someone without warning or explanation; to ignore someone, especially on social media. 

  • To kill. 

  • To ghostwrite. 

  • To imbue with a ghost-like hue or effect. 

  • To sail seemingly without wind. 

  • To appear or move without warning, quickly and quietly; to slip. 

  • To transfer (a prisoner) to another prison without the prior knowledge of other inmates. 

ghosting

noun
  • 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. 

  • Ghost imaging. 

  • The practice of hiding prisoners from inspection from (possibly hostile) outside inspectors. 

  • The blurry appearance of a television picture resulting from interference caused by multipath reception. 

  • A problem with a keyboard where certain simultaneous keypresses trigger the action of a further key that was not in fact pressed. 

  • A method of ending a personal relationship by stopping any contact with the other party and not providing an explanation. 

  • The phenomenon of the writing on one side of a page in a notebook being partly visible on the other side. 

How often have the words ghost and ghosting occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )