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PlainSpell

kompromat

noun

kompromat is a noun meaning “Compromising material, blackmail material, (real or fabricated) evidence that a person does not want revealed, dirt” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled K-O-M-P-R-O-M-A-T, and it appears about once in every 21 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of kompromat is kompromats.

What does kompromat mean?

noun

  1. 1

    Compromising material, blackmail material, (real or fabricated) evidence that a person does not want revealed, dirt.

    Many observers have commented that, with so many Russian newspapers and TV channels now controlled by oligarchs or powerful organisations, kompromat is now a regular feature in the supposedly independent press.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce kompromat?

  • General-American

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-kompromat.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of kompromat

  • kompromats plural
  • compromat

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is kompromat?

Kompromat appears about once in every 21 million words in written English, the 139,999th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Kompromat in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense dirt, compromising material:

LanguageWords
Frenchkompromat
GermanKompromat, kompromittierendes Material

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does kompromat come from?

Borrowed from Russian компрома́т (kompromát), short for компромети́рующий материа́л (komprometírujuščij materiál, “compromising material”). Soviet security service slang from the Stalin era.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).