plagiarism

UK/ˈpleɪd͡ʒəɹɪzəm/US/ˈpleɪd͡ʒəɹɪzəm/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,613 of 15,258leans written

Plagiarism is passing off someone else's writing or ideas as your own. Accused of plagiarism, plagiarism checker, blatant plagiarism.

It is an offence against honesty rather than against the law — copyright is the legal matter, and the two overlap without being the same, since you can plagiarise work that is out of copyright. Universities treat it as misconduct. Note that the Latin plagiarius meant a kidnapper, which is a striking origin.

Definitions of plagiarism

1nounplagiarismPassing off someone else's writing or ideas as your own.B2+
“The student was expelled for plagiarism after copying his essay from a website.”

plagiarism is a form of dishonesty.

Where it comes from

From plagiary + -ism.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in School & Learning, Academic English

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plagiarism in the wild

Helen Keller inadvertently borrowed from a story read to her years earlier, leading to accusations of plagiarism that deeply affected her.
Cryptomnesia
Content similarity detection or plagiarism detection is the process of locating instances of plagiarism or copyright infringement within a work or document.
Content similarity detection
Human detection is the most traditional form of identifying plagiarism from written work.
Content similarity detection
Copyscape is an online plagiarism detection service that checks whether similar text content appears elsewhere on the web.
Copyscape
Not all cultures and countries hold the same beliefs about personal ownership of language or ideas, and plagiarism is typically not in itself a crime.
Plagiarism

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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.

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