Boycott

How to spell boycott

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce boycott

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does boycott mean?

1. verbTo refuse to buy from, deal with, or take part in something as a form of protest.
2. nounAn organised refusal to buy from, deal with, or participate in something as a protest.

Boycott in a sentence

• verb

  The union urged members to boycott the new supplier over its labour record.

• noun

  The consumer boycott cost the company millions in lost sales.

• verb

  Several countries threatened to boycott the trade talks entirely.

• noun

  Activists called for a nationwide boycott of the brand.

Where does boycott come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word is an eponym, meaning it was coined directly from a person's name. It honours, in a backhanded way, Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, a land agent in County Mayo, Ireland. In 1880, during a period of agrarian unrest, the Irish Land League urged tenants to refuse all dealings with Boycott after he tried to evict them; labourers stopped working his fields, shops refused to serve him, and he was socially and economically frozen out. Newspapers across Britain and beyond seized on his name as a convenient label for this new tactic of organised shunning, and within months 'boycott' had become an ordinary verb and noun in English. The spelling simply preserves the captain's surname intact, which is worth remembering: the double 't' at the end is there because that is how his name was spelled.

How the word is built

• boycott (from the surname of Captain Charles C. Boycott); no prefix or suffix, an eponym used whole as both noun and verb