blackmail
n. uncountablen. the act of demanding money or a favor from someone by threatening to reveal a secret about them. It often involves a person feeling trapped because they do not want others to find out the truth.
n. the exertion of pressure or extortion by threatening to reveal incriminating or socially damaging information. In a legal context, it involves the demand for payment or action in exchange for maintaining confidentiality.
He paid the secret witness to stop the blackmail.
The politician's career ended when a former associate tried to use old emails for blackmail.
The plot of the thriller centers on a high-stakes case of digital blackmail, where an anonymous hacker threatens to leak corporate secrets unless a massive ransom is paid in cryptocurrency.
The word is a straightforward compound of black + mail; the second element is not the modern postal sense but the older Scots and northern English male or mal, meaning a rent or tribute, itself from Old English māl “contract, terms”, which in turn hauls in Old Norse mál “agreement, lawsuit” and, further back, Proto-Germanic maþlą “gathering” and Proto-Indo-European med- “to measure or counsel”.
On the Anglo-Scottish Borders and in the Highlands the stuff was exacted by mounted freebooters who offered protection in exchange for produce or labour; the tribute was literally black because it was paid in goods rather than silver, and figuratively black because non-payment frequently ended in arson. Latin clerks labelled the two systems reditus nigri and reditus albi; locals simply called the extorted heap “black mail” and the legitimate coin “white rent”.
By 1826 the compound had slipped its geographical tether and was applied to any coerced payment, after which the original rural protection racket faded into footnote and the word settled into its modern career of threatening polite society from behind a letterbox.
Usually treated as uncountable, though 'a piece of blackmail' or specific instances can be described; frequently occurs with the verbs 'commit', 'attempt', or 'succumb to'.