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steal

Pronunciation: /stiːl/

The English word “steal” has 18 meanings listed here.

verb

  1. To take illegally, or without the owner's permission, something owned by someone else without intending to return it.
  2. To appropriate without giving credit or acknowledgement.
  3. To get or effect surreptitiously or artfully.
  4. To acquire at a low price.
  5. To draw attention unexpectedly in (an entertainment), especially by being the outstanding performer. Usually used in the phrase steal the show.
  6. To move silently or secretly; to pass unnoticed.
  7. To convey (something) clandestinely.
  8. To withdraw or convey (oneself) clandestinely.
  9. To advance safely to (another base) during the delivery of a pitch, without the aid of a hit, walk, passed ball, wild pitch, or defensive indifference.
  10. To dispossess.
  11. To borrow for a short moment.
  12. To take or retell someone else’s joke; to use a clever phrase or expression from someone else in one's own speaking or writing.

noun

  1. The act of stealing.
  2. A piece of merchandise available at a very low, attractive price; the act of buying it.
  3. A situation in which a defensive player actively takes possession of the ball or puck from the opponent's team.
  4. A stolen base.
  5. Scoring in an end without the hammer.
  6. A policy in database systems that a database follows which allows a transaction to be written on nonvolatile storage before its commit occurs.

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English stelen, from Old English stelan, from Proto-West Germanic *stelan, from Proto-Germanic *stelaną. Cognate with Bavarian stöhn (“to steal”), Dutch stelen (“to steal”), German and Low German stehlen (“to steal”), Luxembourgish stielen (“to steal”), Danish stjæle (“to steal”), Faroese stjala (“to steal”), Icelandic stela (“to steal”), Norwegian Bokmål stjele (“to…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.