To binge watch is to watch many episodes of a television series in one sitting, often an entire season at a stretch. The phrase carries a knowing hint of overindulgence: the viewer knows perfectly well that three in the morning is no time to start another episode, and starts it anyway. It arrived with the streaming era but, as is usually the way, the behaviour and the vocabulary are both older than they look.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘binge watch’?
‘Binge’ began in the English Midlands as dialect. A glossary of Leicestershire words published in 1848 records it as a term for soaking a wooden vessel in water so that the timber swelled and stopped leaking, and notes that it was extended locally to excessive drinking, that is, ‘soaking’ of a different kind. By 1854 ‘binge’ was in use as a noun for a drinking bout, and around the First World War it stretched to cover overeating too. The compounds followed: ‘binge-drinking’ is recorded from 1946 and ‘binge-eating’ from 1959, and it was this ready-made template, binge plus a form of consumption, that television viewers eventually borrowed. See also ‘binge drinking’.
Applying it to the screen needed the video recorder. In December 1986 the Philadelphia Inquirer’s TV critic Andy Wickstrom wrote of viewers “saving up the soap operas for weekend binge viewing”, which appears to be the earliest printed use of the idea. The ‘watching’ form emerged a decade later among fans of The X-Files trading VHS tapes on Usenet. The linguist Ben Zimmer traced a 1996 posting in which a fan awaiting tapes predicted “some MASSIVE binge watching right away”, and a 1998 mock questionnaire on an X-Files newsgroup that asked fans whether they ever ‘binge watch (marathon)’. That 1998 posting is also the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence for the verb. By 2003 the phrase was turning up in mainstream press coverage of DVD box sets.
What made it a household term was streaming. When Netflix began releasing entire seasons at once in 2013, starting with House of Cards, weekly scheduling ceased to apply and whole-season viewing became normal behaviour with a name to hand. Oxford Dictionaries shortlisted ‘binge-watch’ for its Word of the Year in 2013, when it lost to ‘selfie’, and Collins went one better in 2015, naming it Word of the Year outright and reporting that usage had risen by around 200% on the year before. A word that started life describing soaked barrels and heavy drinkers had taken barely twenty years to become the standard description of how television is watched.