Word of the Day:
thief
What It Means
One who carries out a theft.
One who steals another person's property, especially by stealth and without using force or violence.
Thief in Context
“Take heed to false harlots, and more, ye wot what. / If noise ye heare, / Looke all be cleare: / Least drabs doe noie thee, / And theeues destroie thee.”
Did You Know?
From Middle English thef, theef, þef, from Old English þēof, from Proto-West Germanic *þeub, from Proto-Germanic *þeubaz. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Tjoof (“thief”), West Frisian tsjeaf (“thief”), Dutch dief (“thief”), Low German Deef, Deev (“thief”), German Dieb (“thief”), Danish tyv (“thief”), Swedish tjuv (“thief”), Icelandic þjófur (“thief”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: thief (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “thief.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/thief. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.