Sabotage means a deliberate act of destruction or disruption in which equipment is damaged, destroy property or hinder normal operations.

Noun: Sabotage

Verb: sabotaged; sabotaging; sabotages

The etymological idea that gave birth to the word ‘sabotage’ is ‘clattering along in noisy shoes’. The word sabot comes from French langauge which means ‘clog’. From it originated the word saboter which means ‘walk along noisily in clogs’. It gives the notion of ‘clumsiness’ or to ‘do work badly’, and finally it came to be associated with the idea of ‘destroying tools, machines, etc deliberately’. Thus the word ‘sabotage’ ultimately began to mean as the ‘destruction of machinery, etc by factory workers’. During to the course of time there was broadening out of the concept and pertained to ‘any deliberate disruptive destruction’. The word was acquired in English langauge around 1910.

Some theories related to the origin of this word are

There is another theory related to the origin of this word ‘sabotage’. French Luddites used to throw their wooden clogs into powered looms to clog the machinery at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

Another theory is that the original saboteurs were the farmers who trampled crops with their wooden clogs to force the landowners to meet their demands.

In another theory it is considered that the word originated at the time of a French railway strike of 1912. The word “sabot” or wooden shoes were used to keep the rails of railway lines in place. In order to show their anguish the strikers loosened or destroyed the sabots which made the rail traffic difficult or impossible.

But whatever was the theory, we can conclude that the word comes from the wooden shoes or ‘sabot’.