Scapegoat

How to spell scapegoat

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scapegoat

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scapegoat mean?

1. nounA person who is unfairly blamed and made to bear responsibility for the mistakes or failures of others.
2. verbTo unfairly blame a person or group for a problem caused by others.

Scapegoat in a sentence

• noun

  The junior analyst became the scapegoat for the whole department's losses.

• verb

  The report warned against any attempt to scapegoat junior staff for the missed deadline.

• noun

  Management needed a scapegoat to explain the failed product launch.

• verb

  It is easy to scapegoat one employee rather than fix a broken process.

Where does scapegoat come from?

Language of origin: Hebrew

This word was coined by the English Bible translator William Tyndale in 1530, and it has a vivid origin in ancient ritual. Translating the Book of Leviticus, Tyndale rendered the Latin caper emissarius, 'the goat that is sent out', as 'scapegoat', joining 'scape', a shortened form of 'escape', to 'goat'. The idea came from the Hebrew ritual of the Day of Atonement, in which one goat was sacrificed and a second had the community's sins symbolically laid upon it before being driven into the wilderness, thus 'escaping' alive while carrying everyone's guilt. By the early 1800s the word had broadened from this religious image into its modern everyday meaning: a person unfairly blamed for the mistakes or wrongdoing of others. The spelling trap lies entirely in that opening 'scape', which preserves the old clipped 'escape' and is easy to misremember as 'scrape' or 'escape'.

How the word is built

• scape- (shortened form of 'escape')
• goat (the animal)