Word of the Day:
persecution
What It Means
The act of persecuting, especially a specific group of people; an instance of persecution.
Many apartheid perpetrators escaped prosecution for their persecution of black Africans and political dissidents.
Persecution in Context
“During the early 20th century, wolves were considered undesirable. They were subject to persecution and were extirpated from large areas of their original range. With increased environmental awareness in the 1970s, attitudes toward wolves began to change.”
Did You Know?
Equivalent to persecute + -ion. From Middle English persecucioun, from Old French persecucion, from Ecclesiastical Latin persecūtio (“persecution; chase, pursuit”), from Latin persequor (“follow up, pursue”), from per- (“through”) + sequor (“follow”). Displaced native Old English ēhtnes.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: persecution (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “persecution.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/persecution. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
