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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

refoulement.

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.

11 characters4 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ɹəˈfuːlmɒ̃/Received-Pronunciation/ɹəˌfulˈmɑn/General-American
  1. 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.

    uncountable
  2. An instance thereof.

    countable
  3. The forced relocation of a group of people.

    archaic · uncountable
  4. An instance of that relocation.

    archaic · countable
Where this word comes from

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).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.