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Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening a polity, government, effort, or organization through subversion, obstruction, demoralization, destabilization, division, disruption, or destruction. One who engages in sabotage is a saboteur. Saboteurs typically try to conceal their identities because of the consequences of their actions and to avoid invoking legal and organizational requirements for addressing sabotage. The English word derives from the French word saboter, meaning to "bungle, botch, wreck or sabotage"; it was originally used to refer to labour disputes, in which workers wearing wooden shoes called sabots interrupted production through different means. A popular but incorrect account of the origin of the term's present meaning is the story that poor workers in the Belgian city of Liège would throw a wooden sabot into the machines to disrupt production. One of the first appearances of saboter and saboteur in French literature is in the Dictionnaire du Bas-Langage ou manières de parler usitées parmi le peuple of d'Hautel, edited in 1808. In it the literal definition is to 'make noise with sabots' as well as 'bungle, jostle, hustle, haste'. The word sabotage appears only later. The word sabotage is found in 1873–1874 in the Dictionnaire de la langue française of Émile Littré. Here it is defined mainly as 'making sabots, sabot maker'. It is at the end of the 19th century that it really began to be used with the meaning of 'deliberately and maliciously destroying property' or 'working slower'. In 1897, Émile Pouget, a famous syndicalist and anarchist wrote "action de saboter un travail" ('action of sabotaging or bungling a work') in Le Père Peinard and in 1911 he also wrote a book entitled Le Sabotage. At the inception of the Industrial Revolution, skilled workers such as the Luddites (1811–1812) used sabotage as a means of negotiation in labor disputes. Labor unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) have advocated sabotage as a means of self-defense and direct action against unfair working conditions.

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