incite
v.v. to encourage or stir up violent or unlawful behavior. You use this when someone tries to make others act in an angry or aggressive way.
v. to encourage, stir up, or provoke unlawful or violent behavior. Transitive; typically takes a direct object representing the action or emotion being provoked.
The speaker tried to incite a riot.
The group was accused of using social media to incite violence against local businesses during the protest.
Legal scholars often debate the precise threshold at which inflammatory political rhetoric crosses the line from protected free speech to a criminal attempt to incite immediate lawless action.
From Middle French inciter, from Latin incitō (“to set in motion, hasten, urge, incite”), from in (“in, on”) + citō (“to set in motion, urge”), frequentative of cieō (“to rouse, excite, call”).
The verb is transitive and requires a direct object, such as 'violence', 'hatred', or 'a riot'.
incite to a riotincite a riotIncite is a transitive verb and should be followed directly by the noun phrase it acts upon without a preposition.