scapegoating
scapegoating is the present participle and gerund of scapegoat.
Meaning of scapegoat
Verb
scapegoat (third-person singular simple present scapegoats, present participle scapegoating, simple past and past participle scapegoated)
- To unfairly blame or punish someone for some failure; to make a scapegoat of.
- People tend to fear and then to scapegoat ... groups which seem to them to be fundamentally different from their own.1950, Rachel Davis DuBois, Neighbors in Action: A Manual for Local Leaders in Intergroup Relations, page 37
Noun
scapegoating (plural scapegoatings)
- The act of making somebody a scapegoat.
- Nazi persecution of Jews, as with other scapegoatings, was focused, systematic and directly lethal. Other oppressions have been more long-term and uneven […]1989, Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain, page 224
Forms of scapegoating
| plural | scapegoatings |
|---|
Questions about scapegoating
- What does scapegoating mean?
- Scapegoating means the act of making somebody a scapegoat.
- What is scapegoating the present participle and gerund of?
- Scapegoating is the present participle and gerund of scapegoat.
- What part of speech is scapegoating?
- Scapegoating is a noun.
- What is the plural of scapegoating?
- The plural of scapegoating is scapegoatings.
Words near scapegoating in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: scapegoating (page history and authors); scapegoat (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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Cite this entry: “scapegoating.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/scapegoating. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.