noun, verb
noun [U]
1 the crime of demanding money from a person by threatening to tell sb else a secret about them
2 the act of putting pressure on a person or a group to do sth they do not want to do, for example by making threats or by making them feel guilty:
emotional / moral blackmail
verb [VN] ~ sb (into doing sth) to force sb to give you money or do sth for you by threatening them, for example by saying you will tell people a secret about them:
She blackmailed him for years by threatening to tell the newspapers about their affair. * The President said he wouldn't be blackmailed into agreeing to the terrorists' demands.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
Where does this definition of blackmail come from?
This entry for blackmail is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Does blackmail appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — blackmail appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.