Word.ws English Dictionary

scapegoats

scapegoats is the plural of scapegoat.

scapegoats is the third-person singular simple present indicative of scapegoat.

Meaning of scapegoat

Noun

scapegoat (plural scapegoats)

  1. In the Mosaic Day of Atonement ritual, a goat symbolically imbued with the sins of the people, and sent out alive into the wilderness while another was sacrificed.
    • And Aarõ caſt lottes ouer the .ij. gootes: one lotte for the Lorde, ãd another for a ſcapegoote.1530 January 27 (Gregorian calendar), W[illiam] T[yndale], transl., [The Pentateuch] (Tyndale Bible), Malborow [Marburg], Hesse: […] Hans Luft [actually Antwerp: Johan Hoochstraten], →OCLC, Leuiticus...
  2. Someone unfairly blamed or punished for some failure.
    • He is making me a scapegoat for his own poor business decisions and the supply chain disruptions caused by the hurricane!

See all 3 meanings of scapegoat

Questions about scapegoats

What is scapegoats the plural of?
Scapegoats is the plural of scapegoat.

Words near scapegoats in the dictionary

  1. scapegoating
  2. scapegoatings
  3. scapegoatish
  4. scapegoatism
  5. scapegoatisms
  6. scapegoats
  7. scapegrace
  8. scapegraces
  9. scapeless
  10. scapement
  11. scapements

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: scapegoats (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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