refoulement
Plural: refoulements
Noun
- The involuntary sending of refugees or asylum seekers to their country of origin or another one, where they are likely to face persecution and harm.
- An instance thereof.
- The forced relocation of a group of people.
- An instance of that relocation.
Origin / Etymology
Borrowed from French refoulement (“act of pushing something back (as gunpowder into a gun barrel, or water by a dam); act of water overflowing; forced relocation of a group of people; forced repatriation of asylum-seekers or refugees”), from refouler (“to cause to flow or turn back; to repress, suppress; to repulse; to trample on again”) (from re- (prefix meaning ‘again’) + fouler (“to impress, stamp; to trample, walk on; to mistreat, oppress”) (ultimately from Medieval Latin fullare (“to make cloth denser and firmer by soaking, beating and pressing, to full”), from Latin fullō (“one who fulls cloth, fuller”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *bʰleh₃- (“to blow; to inflate, swell”)) + -ment (suffix forming nouns from verbs, usually denoting resulting actions or states).
Antonyms
non-refoulement
Scrabble Score: 16
refoulement: valid Scrabble (US) TWL wordrefoulement: not valid in Scrabble (MW) Merriam-Webster Dictionary
refoulement: not valid in International Collins CSW Dictionary