sabotage

plural sabotages

1. uncountableusuallyA deliberate action aimed at weakening someone (or something, a nation, etc) or preventing them from being successful, through subversion, obstruction, disruption, and/or destruction.

present singular third person sabotages · participle present sabotaging · participle past sabotaged · past sabotaged

1. To deliberately destroy or damage something in order to prevent it from being successful.

   Our plans were sabotaged.

   4 more examples

   The railway line had been sabotaged by enemy commandos.

   The Hedjaz Railway is best known for its connections to T. E. Lawrence, whose fame as "El Orens", the railway wrecker, spread quickly throughout Arabia. He arrived at Yenbo in December, 1916, and immediately started his campaign to sabotage the railway, but to keep it sufficiently in working order to allow supplies to reach Medina.

   1956 March, R. C. Blaker, “The Hedjaz Railway”, in Railway Magazine, pages 166-167

   Five minutes later, Southampton tried to mount their first attack, but Wickham sabotaged the move by tripping the rampaging Nathaniel Clyne, prompting the referee, Andre Marriner, to issue a yellow card. That was a lone blemish on an otherwise tidy start by Poyet’s team – until, that is, the 12th minute, when Vergini produced a candidate for the most ludicrous own goal in Premier League history.

   2014 October 18, Paul Doyle, “Southampton hammer eight past hapless Sunderland in barmy encounter”, in The Guardian

   The only amusing highlight was Gudgeon having managed to exploit U.S. codebreaking efforts to ambush and destroy the submarine I-173, albeit not for the lack of the Mark 14's trying to sabotage the effort, as the torpedo that had hit the sub had refused to detonate; it seemed, however, that the car-crash levels of kinetic energy involved in the dud simply ramming the sub had nonetheless done enough to fatally damage it.

   2021 December 29, Drachinifel, 21:03 from the start, in The USN Pacific Submarine Campaign - The Dark Year (Dec'41 - Dec'42), archived from the original on 19 Jul 2022