The first uses of “binge watching,” “binge viewing,” and other variants date to the late 1990s on online user forums, perhaps for the X-Files. In 1996, a fan looking for VHS tapes of the show wrote: “There are three of us who all got hooked at the same time, so I’d predict that there’d be some MASSIVE binge watching right away! :-).” The phrase, however, only began to show up in mainstream sources in 2003; Emily Nussbaum, of The New York Times, wrote an article on the growing popularity of TV show DVDs. “DVD’s are perfect for fast-paced arc shows like ‘24,’ increasing the intensity of the action and introducing the sickly pleasures of binge-viewing.” But the word became widely used in 2013 after Netflix began releasing the full seasons at once, prompting the Oxford Dictionary to add it to the language and also short-list it as “Word of the Year” (the ultimate winner was “selfie”).

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 1114