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If a person or a group of people boycott a business, organization, country, etc. they refuse to have any involvement with it in order to show their disapproval and to force a change in policy, habits, attitude, etc. To boycott a business is to refuse to have dealings with it or to refuse to buy its products or use its services.
For instance, to boycott a restaurant means to refuse to eat in it or order food from it. To boycott an event or activity means to refuse to be involved in it or cooperate with it. Many people recently boycotted Disney’s movie, Mulan.
So, a boycott can be an informal ban, voluntarily undertaken by a group of people as a protest or punishment. It can also be an official ban enforced by a government. For example, a government might boycott trade with another country or boycott negotiations.
Etymology of Boycott
The term boycott comes from 1870s Ireland, where an agricultural crisis caused landowners to increase rents and enforce more evictions of farmers.
In response, the farmers formed a Land League to protest against these cruel measures.
A retired British army captain named Charles Boycott was acting as an agent for an absentee landlord and when Boycott tried to evict some farmers who could not pay their rent, he was shunned and ostracized by the community.
His workers and servants quit and his own crops rotted in the ground.
News of this spread and his name soon became synonymous with the protest strategy that caused his misfortune.
Boycott Sentence Examples
“Making their strongest statement yet in the fight against racial injustice, players from six NBA teams decided not to play postseason games on Wednesday in a boycott that quickly reverberated across other professional leagues.” — Brian Mahoney and Tim Reynolds, Associated Press
“Many people continue to boycott the restaurant chain Chick-fil-A over its support of anti-LGBTQ causes.”
“Goodyear banned MAGA hats so Trump called on his supporters to boycott Goodyear.”
“Stores in small towns are able to get away with price gouging during the pandemic because they know that boycotting them would be impossible. There are very few stores from which the locals can choose.”
More Etymology
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- Origin of Riding Shotgun | Calling Shotgun
- Origin of Earmark
- Etymology of the Word Invent
- Etymology of the Word Boulder