Boycott

Part of speech: verb, noun

Pronunciation: /ˈbɔɪkɒt/

Definitions

1. To intentionally refrain from engaging in or purchasing from a certain entity as a protest aimed at effecting change
2. A concerted effort by individuals or groups to withdraw participation from a service or product in order to express dissent or influence decision-making
3. To actively avoid or refuse to support a person, organization, or product as a means of protest or to drive social change

Etymology: In the autumn of 1880, a retired English army captain in County Mayo found that no one would work his fields, shoe his horse, deliver his post or sell him a loaf of bread. Within weeks his surname had become a verb, and within a few years it was spreading into other European languages. He lived another seventeen years, long enough to watch it happen. Charles Cunningham Boycott managed the estates of Lord Erne near Lough Mask. In a bad season, the tenants asked for a large cut in their rents. The landlord offered far less, and when they refused to pay, the agent moved to serve eviction notices. The Irish Land League, campaigning against landlords, had a tactic ready. That September, Charles Stewart Parnell had urged that anyone who took over an evicted tenant's farm should be shunned "as if he were a leper of old." The people of the district turned that weapon on the agent himself. His labourers walked off, shopkeepers would not serve him, and his crops stood unharvested. The standoff became a national spectacle. About fifty volunteers came from Ulster to bring in the harvest, guarded by roughly a thousand soldiers and police. Saving the crop cost far more than it was worth. By December, the captain had left Ireland. According to the American journalist James Redpath, who was reporting from Ireland, the local priest, Father John O'Malley, suggested using the captain's name for the practice, because "ostracism" was too learned a word for the people who were doing it. Whoever coined it, the new verb was in English newspapers before the year was out. A Victorian land agent's surname is now a common verb: "boycotter" in French, "boykottieren" in German, "бойкотировать" in Russian. The man himself went back to the same trade, as land agent on an estate at Flixton in Suffolk, where he died in 1897.

Synonyms: protest, shun, exclude, refuse, ostracize

Antonyms: support, endorse, promote, welcome, embrace