Donglegate

name

name ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A controversy of 2013 in which a woman at a technology conference took offense on overhearing an apparently ribald joke involving the word dongle and published the two men's photographs on the Internet in an attempt to shame them, causing one to be fired from his job.

    "The interaction, now referred to as “Donglegate,” resulted in one of the males being fired by his company. Richards herself became the target of hate, threats, and a denial-of-service attack on her website."

Example

More examples

"The interaction, now referred to as “Donglegate,” resulted in one of the males being fired by his company. Richards herself became the target of hate, threats, and a denial-of-service attack on her website."

Etymology

From dongle + -gate.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.