Other forms: blamed, blaming, blames
To blame somebody is to say they are the reason something went wrong. Do not blame me. She blamed the weather. It is one of the most used verbs in an argument.
There are two patterns and they mean the same thing, which is why they get mixed up: blame somebody for something, and blame something on somebody. Blame the delay on the traffic; blame the traffic for the delay. Both are correct; blame something to somebody is not. The noun is uncountable — take the blame, get the blame — and to be to blame is the standard way of saying responsible, always with be and always without an object.
1verbblameTo say that somebody or something caused a problem.
“Everybody blamed the referee.”
2nounresponsibilityResponsibility for something that went wrong.
“She took the blame for all of it.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
blame is an assignment of fault.
Blame is a worn-down form of blaspheme — both come from Greek blasphemein, to speak evil of. The religious sense split off into blasphemy while the everyday one shortened into blame, so accusing somebody of leaving the door open is, etymologically, blaspheming them.
Ancient Greek
βλασφημέω
Latin
blastemo
Old French
blame
Middle English
blame
English, today
blame
Built from
From Middle English blame, borrowed from Old French blame, blasme, produced from the verb blasmer, which in turn is derived from Latin blastemo, variant of blasphemo, from Ancient Greek βλασφημέω. a doublet of blaspheme. Displaced native tǣling and tǣlan (“to blame”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA