sabotage

Etymology

From French sabotage.

noun

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

verb

1. To deliberately destroy or damage something in order to prevent it from being successful.
   The railway line had been sabotaged by enemy commandos.
   Our plans were sabotaged.
   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. 18 October 2014, 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. 29 December 2021, Drachinifel, 21:03 from the start, in The USN Pacific Submarine Campaign - The Dark Year (Dec'41 - Dec'42), archived from the original on 2022-07-19