As with concepts like the “teenager” and “middle-class,” dating is an historically recent invention, spurred by an influx of women into the big cities seeking work around the turn of the 20th Century. The word “date” was coined — inadvertently, it seems — by George Ade, a columnist for the Chicago Record, in 1896.

When was the word date first used?

1896 The word date was allegedly coined in 1896, by a forlorn lover. According to Moira Weigels book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, the word date first popped up in a newspaper column in which a heartbroken clerk named Artie wrote that the object of his affections was seeing other people.