harassment

Borrowed from Middle French harassement. By surface analysis, harass +‎ -ment.

• IPA^(key): /həˈɹæs.mənt/, /ˈhæɹ.əs.mənt/, /-mɪnt/
  • See harass for pronunciation note.

• Audio (US):

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• Audio (Southern England):

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harassment (countable and uncountable, plural harassments)

1. Persistent attacks and criticism causing worry and distress.
2. Deliberate pestering or intimidation.
   • 2024 November 14, Lauren del Valle, “After suicide of nonbinary teen, DOE finds multiple Title IX violations at Oklahoma school district”, in CNN‎^[1]:

     “As a result, OCR found that the district’s pattern of inconsistent responses to reports it received of sexual harassment – infrequently responding under Title IX or not responding at all – rose to the level that the district’s response to some families’ sexual harassment reports was deliberately indifferent to students’ civil rights,” a news release from DOE reads.

3. (military) The use of repeated small-scale attacks to wear down an enemy force.
   • 2019 February 27, Drachinifel, 27:22 from the start, in The Battle of Samar - Odds? What are those?‎^[2], archived from the original on 3 November 2022:

     Throughout this period, and beyond, into the rest of the battle, aircraft of various types and loadouts are crisscrossing the skies in desperate harassment attacks, with the pilots having to play constant games of "guess the carrier" to decide where to land as escort carriers are hit, sunk, disappear in columns of shell splashes, or are forced to evade at angles to the wind that make landing on them impossible.

• torment
• molestation

• → Russian: хара́ссмент (xarássment)
• → Japanese: ハラスメント

• “harassment”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.