scapegoat

  1. Noun.  In the Mosaic Day of Atonement ritual, a goat symbolically imbued with the sins of the people, and sent out alive into the wilderness while another was sacrificed.
  2. Noun.  Someone punished for the error or errors of someone else.
  3. Verb.  (transitive) To punish someone for the error or errors of someone else; to make a scapegoat of.
  4. Verb.  (transitive) To blame something for the problems of a given society without evidence to back up the claim.

This is an unmodified, but possibly outdated, definition from Wiktionary and used here under the Creative Commons license. Wiktionary is a great resource. If you like it too, please donate to Wikimedia.

This entry was last updated on RefTopia from its source on 3/20/2012.