Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context historical English) A search for witches, persons believed to be using sorcery or harmful magic, in order to persecute and typically kill them. 2 An attempt to find and publicly punish a group of people perceived as a threat, usually on ideological or political grounds. 3 A public smear-campaign against an individual.
WordNet
n. searching out and harassing dissenters
Wikipedia
A witch-hunt is a search for people labelled "witches" or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic or mass hysteria.
- The classical period of witchhunts in Early Modern Europe and Colonial North America falls into the Early Modern period or about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 100,000 executions.
- Europe: The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century.
- Scotland: The witchcraft trials in Scotland took place during the period 1561-1727.
- Kingdom of Great Britain: Witchcraft ceased to be an act punishable by law with the Witchcraft Act of 1735.
- Germany: Sorcery remained punishable by law into the late 18th century
- Africa, Asia and Australia: Contemporary witch-hunts have also been reported from Sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea.
- Cameroon and Saudi Arabia: Official legislation against witchcraft is still found in Saudi Arabia and Cameroon.
- From at least the 1930s, the term " witch-hunt" has been used figuratively to describe activities by governments (and, occasionally, by business entities) to seek out and expose perceived enemies, often apparently as a means of directing public opinion by fostering a degree of moral panic.
- The Second Red Scare of the 1950s, culminating in the McCarthyist persecution of suspected communists in the United States, is especially associated with this usage of the term "witch hunt."
- In India, around 2,100 suspected, mostly women, witches were murdered between 2000 and 2012 in India's tribal and Dalit communities.
Usage examples of "witch-hunt".
I have been reading in every left-wing paper the same type of gobbledygook that I find in your speeches talking about the barbarism of the committees, the same Salem witch-hunts.
It had been eleven centuries since the last religious war among humans, and no Spiritist had ever sponsored a pogrom, crusade, inquisition, jihad, or witch-hunt.
A careless programmer trying to disassemble an immensely complicated computer system, a public witch-hunt to stamp out "inhuman" research.
In 1955 I began thinking about an idea for a short novel that dealt with the American anti-intellectualism I saw as the reason for the success of HUAC’s and Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunts.
He was witch-hunting, of that she was sure, and she wasn't going to be the witch involved.
One of those who'd vanished in the witch-hunts then had been his betrothed.
To do something about Petissanji, who would continue to goad Abendar into witch-hunts with or without Thainn's help.
The witch-hunts often targeted social or gender deviants, particularly women who didn't comply with accepted female roles.
And in later years, when the insanity of witch-hunts was all the rage in western Europe, there were none in Poland.
Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunts of the early 1950s seemed to confirm that what the post-war world wanted most was freedom from social upheaval.