Word.ws English Dictionary

sneak thief

sneak thief noun: a thief who steals without being noticed and without using violence.

Noun

sneak thief (plural sneak thieves)

  1. A thief who steals without being noticed and without using violence.
    • […] travelling gangs of Moorish artisans, heavy armed Templars on their way to the Sepulchre, wandering minstrels, sneakthieves, bawds, rowdy strings of knights and foot-soldiers setting out with wine-skins at their saddlebows to cross the passes towards the debatable lands of Extremadura, […]1922, John Dos Passos, “Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile”, in Rosinante to the Road Again, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, →OCLC

Forms of sneak thief

pluralsneak thieves
alternative formsneakthief

Origin of sneak thief

From sneak + thief. Compare Danish snigtyv (literally “sneak thief”).

Questions about sneak thief

What does sneak thief mean?
Sneak thief means a thief who steals without being noticed and without using violence.
What part of speech is sneak thief?
Sneak thief is a noun.
What is the plural of sneak thief?
The plural of sneak thief is sneak thieves.

Words near sneak thief in the dictionary

  1. sneak peak
  2. sneak peek
  3. sneak peeks
  4. sneak preview
  5. sneak previews
  6. sneak thief
  7. sneak thieves
  8. sneak up
  9. sneak-cup
  10. sneak-cups
  11. sneakage

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sneak thief (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “sneak thief.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sneak_thief. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.