Addicting vs. Addictive

Factual Questions
1

I was watching one of those Philip Morris commercials about all the info they have on their website about cigarettes and health problems. The text on the screen says “Cigarettes are addictive” the announcer says “Cigarettes are addicting”.

Okay. Addicting isn’t a word that I can find in my dictionary nor on merriamwebster.com. Dictionary.com has it under addict but doesn’t use it in a sentence.

Addictive should be the proper word, right?

Video games are addictive. They’re not addicting. (trying to get this away from cigarettes which is not the subject here).

Okay, another way. Video games are [adjective]. Video games are [verb]. The construction doesn’t make sense. Am I wrong here?

I’ve been seeing ‘addicting’ on this board and heard people saying it in real life.

So, is addicting a word or is this going to be a new pet peeve?

2

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3

Addicting is not a verb; it’s a participle, an adjective formed from a verb. Such a thing is called a “verbal adjective”, or just a “verbal”. So the construction does makes sense.

4

Just for the hell of it, I did an informal and unscientific survey using Google. Typing in “addictive” produced 1,540,000 hits, while “addicting” produced 249,000 hits. So, “addictive” is used roughly 6 times more often. Of course, this may mean nothing, although I did find it telling. FWIW, I’ve always used “addictive”.

“Addicting” appears several times in Bartleby.com’s reference works.