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salami tactics

salami tactics noun: the piecemeal removal or scaling back of something (especially political opposition); a gradual attack on an opposing position, group, etc.

Noun

salami tactics pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) The piecemeal removal or scaling back of something (especially political opposition); a gradual attack on an opposing position, group, etc.
    • At another level, there are what the Americans describe as Iraq's "salami tactics" - picking at weak points in the rules of sanctions, preferably in ways that cause disagreement between the US and other countries.2001 January 3, Brian Whitaker, “The great survivor”, in The Guardian
    • The tactics were more those of 1948 in Prague than St. Petersburg in 1917, consisting of the slow acquisition of positions in the army and the police, and the application of what used to be called “salami tactics” against other parties.2010, Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22, McClelland & Stewart, published 2010, →ISBN, page 184

salami tactics meaning in Vietnamese

salami tactics in Vietnamese

piecemeal removal
chiến thuật cắt lát salami

Origin of salami tactics

Calque of Hungarian szalámitaktika, coined by Hungarian communist Mátyás Rákosi to describe the method, "cutting them off like slices of salami", by which the ruling Hungarian Working People's Party dealt with dissidents under his leadership.

Questions about salami tactics

What does salami tactics mean?
Salami tactics means the piecemeal removal or scaling back of something (especially political opposition); a gradual attack on an opposing position, group, etc.
What is salami tactics in Vietnamese?
Salami tactics in Vietnamese is chiến thuật cắt lát salami. See Salami tactics meaning in Vietnamese.
What part of speech is salami tactics?
Salami tactics is a noun.

Words near salami tactics in the dictionary

  1. salami publishing
  2. salami slice
  3. salami sliced
  4. salami slices
  5. salami slicing
  6. salami tactics
  7. salami technique
  8. salami techniques
  9. salami-slice
  10. salami-sliced
  11. salami-slices

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: salami tactics (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-salami tactics.ogg.

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