Word.ws English Dictionary

time thief

time thief noun: something or someone that consumes an inordinate amount of time, especially without achieving anything productive.

Noun

time thief (plural time thieves)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) Something or someone that consumes an inordinate amount of time, especially without achieving anything productive.
    • Genie is also an invaluable asset when gabbing on the telephone which can really be a time thief since it's so easy to lose track of time when lost in deep conversation with another.2006, Don Boyer, The Power of Mentorship, Real Life Teaching/Publishing, →ISBN, page 137
    • In fact, anything we do just to kill time—even essentially healthy activities like reading, chatting on the phone, or completing a sudoku puzzle—becomes a time thief.2008, Jan Silvious, Smart Girls Think Twice: Making Wise Choices When It Counts, Thomas Nelson, →ISBN, page 61

Synonyms of time thief

Forms of time thief

pluraltime thieves

Questions about time thief

What does time thief mean?
Time thief means something or someone that consumes an inordinate amount of time, especially without achieving anything productive.
What part of speech is time thief?
Time thief is a noun.
What is the plural of time thief?
The plural of time thief is time thieves.

Words near time thief in the dictionary

  1. time terms
  2. time test
  3. time tested
  4. time tests
  5. time theft
  6. time thief
  7. time thieves
  8. time thrust
  9. time thrusts
  10. time to come
  11. time to expiry

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: time 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-time thief.ogg.

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