A French sabot was a wooden shoe carved from a single block of wood — cheap, durable, and characteristic footwear of the rural poor across France and the Low Countries. The verb saboter, from which English borrowed "sabotage," originally meant simply "to walk noisily, to clatter about" — the way a worker in wooden shoes naturally would.
A Slang Verb Becomes a Noun
By the late 19th century, saboter had picked up a more figurative meaning in French slang: to bungle a job, to do work badly or carelessly. The noun sabotage appeared in print around 1897, used by trade unionists to describe deliberate inefficiency — working slowly, or with a heavy hand, to put pressure on employers without going on strike.
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The Shoe-in-the-Machine Myth
One persistent story claims that "sabotage" comes from striking French workers throwing their wooden shoes into factory machinery to break it. The tale is colourful and sticks in the mind, but historians have found very little evidence for it. The earliest French uses of sabotage in a labour context refer to deliberate slowness and clumsy work — not to literal industrial vandalism. The shoe-in-the-loom story seems to be a back-formation, an invented origin that fits the modern English meaning of the word.
Into Wartime English
"Sabotage" entered English in the early 20th century, alongside "syndicalism" and other French labour-movement vocabulary. The First World War broadened the meaning significantly: from "deliberate inefficiency by workers" to "covert destruction by enemy agents." By the Second World War, "sabotage" was firmly fixed in its modern sense — the secret destruction of equipment, infrastructure, or operations — and the original wooden shoe had walked entirely out of view.