character assassination

1. 1.

   an attack intended to ruin someone's reputation

   Synonymsassassinationblackwash

   Broaderdefamation

Questions about character assassination

What does character assassination mean?

character assassination means "an attack intended to ruin someone's reputation".

What is another word for character assassination?

Close synonyms include assassination, blackwash. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is character assassination a common word?

character assassination is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.