To stymie someone is to block them so they cannot do what they planned. Not to defeat them outright — to get in the way, so that their plan stops moving. The feeling is of being stuck rather than beaten. What gets stymied is usually a plan, an effort, an investigation, a piece of legislation, or a person trying to carry one out. 'The bad weather stymied our plans.' 'Efforts to reform the system have been stymied by a lack of money.' Notice that the blocker is often not a person with bad intentions — it can be weather, money, rules, or bad luck. You meet it most in newspapers, especially political reporting, where plans are constantly being stymied by someone. In everyday speech people are more likely to say 'blocked', 'held up', or 'got in the way of'. So the word feels a little journalistic, a little clever — the kind of word a headline writer likes because it is short and vivid. It appears very often in the passive: 'was stymied by', 'have been stymied'. If you learn one shape, learn that one, because that is how you will actually meet it in reading. One pleasant fact: this word comes from golf. A stymie was the old situation where your opponent's ball lay in the line between your ball and the hole, so you could not make a straight shot. The golf rule was abolished long ago, but the word escaped onto the sports pages and then into general use. The origin before golf is uncertain — probably a Scots word connected with poor eyesight or with the smallest glimpse of something, but scholars are not agreed on it.

阻撓、使受阻（計畫、調查、法案被卡住）。常見被動式 be stymied by。中文語感接近「卡住了」「橫生阻礙」，不是「打敗」。