Sabotage

How to spell sabotage

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce sabotage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sabotage mean?

1. nounThe deliberate destruction, damage, or obstruction of something, especially for political or competitive advantage.
2. verbTo deliberately destroy, damage, or obstruct something so that it fails.

Sabotage in a sentence

• noun

  Investigators suspected sabotage when the factory's main line failed twice in one week.

• verb

  A disgruntled employee tried to sabotage the merger by hiding key documents.

• noun

  The leaked memo was clearly an act of corporate sabotage aimed at the rival bid.

• verb

  Poor planning can sabotage even the most promising project.

Where does sabotage come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes directly from French and is built on sabot, the word for a clumsy wooden shoe of the kind once worn by peasants and workers. From sabot the French formed the verb saboter, which originally meant to walk noisily in such shoes and then came to mean to do a job carelessly or to botch it. By the early twentieth century the noun sabotage carried the sharper sense of deliberately damaging or obstructing work, a meaning often linked to labour disputes in which workers disrupted machinery or production. English borrowed sabotage around 1910, keeping the French spelling intact, which is why the ending is the soft -age that sounds like 'tahzh' rather than the hard English -age of 'package'. The lingering folk story that strikers literally threw wooden shoes into machines is colourful but not the documented origin; the link runs through clumsy work rather than flying clogs.

How the word is built

• sabot (French wooden shoe)
• -age (noun/action suffix)