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plagiarise

verbC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechToo rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

Other forms: plagiarised, plagiarising

To plagiarise is to pass somebody else's writing off as your own. Plagiarise a source.

Software now compares any essay against millions of others in seconds. To plagiarise from one source is theft and from many is called research, which is an old joke with something in it.

Definitions of plagiarise

  1. 1verbplagiariseTo pass somebody else's writing off as your own.C1

    “He plagiarised four paragraphs and lost the degree.”

plagiarise is an action.

Also accepted in games: plagiarize

Where it comes from

Latin plagiarius, a kidnapper, used by the poet Martial of somebody who stole his verses.

  1. Latin

    plagiare — to kidnap, to abduct

  2. English, today

    plagiarise

From plagiary + -ise, ultimately from Latin plagiare (“to kidnap, to abduct”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

plagiarise in the wild

  • Several authors have been known to plagiarise or "borrow" heavily from his works.

    Surender Mohan Pathak

  • Although Baglivi feared that Berger would plagiarise it, historiographical investigations have never revealed any evidence of publication of the missing manuscript pages in any form.

    Johann Gottfried Berger

  • Moncrieff's response was to plagiarise Nickleby in another production in 1839.

    Samuel Weller, or, The Pickwickians

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.