I am not a fan of going shopping. For me, it is functional, get in there, get what you need, and get out again. A browse round a bookshop is fun, of course, but that’s about it.

The rise of online shopping has changed all of that. On the one hand, you don’t need to go shopping, you can just do it on the computer. On the other, you can go shopping any hour of day or night, you are no longer spared just because the doors have been locked.

Now I’m sure we have all been guilty of going into shops, checking out a price, whipping out our phone to compare it to online competitors and then leaving to make that purchase from our living room. Maybe what we didn’t know was that we were ‘showrooming’.

Showrooming is defined as doing precisely what I have described, examining goods in a physical shop and then buying them cheaper online. When I say defined, of course, I don’t mean officially. Showrooming has not yet made it to the official annals of most dictionaries.

I am in a bit of a quandary about this word. I have often said that words emerge when there are new trends in need of a descriptor, and there is no doubt that this is a new activity and there is currently no adequate word in the language to encapsulate it. It is just that I can’t see anybody ever saying it. It feels like a term invented for the written media, for headline writers or analysts to use. Surely people will simply continue to say they are going shopping, even if they have no intention of actually buying anything while out. Surely people will use longer sentences if they want to go into details about what they have done, rather than using this particular word.

So while showrooming is likely to stick around for those who write about this phenomenon, I think it is unlikely to enter common speech for those who are actually doing it.