the.com/stalker
Someone whose obsessive watching and tracking turns another person's life into ongoing fear.
means Someone who obsessively watches, follows, or tracks another person, usually against their will and often with a fixation that curdles into fear for the person being watched.
from From Old English 'stealcian,' to walk stealthily or steal along — the hunter's word, tied to 'stalk' in its sense of creeping up on game. For centuries it stayed in that hunting register, used for both the cautious pursuit of deer and the slow approach of a predator. The leap to describing obsessive human pursuit happened as the language borrowed the hunter's patience and silence to name a very different, unwelcome kind of watching — the prey now a person who never agreed to be followed.
- legal line
- repeated unwanted contact, not just one creepy text
- common myth
- usually a stranger — actually usually an ex
- modern form
- now mostly done through screens, not shadows
- root word
- from stealthy hunting, literally stalking prey