Shoplifting is secretly taking goods from a shop without paying. Caught shoplifting, shoplifting charges, a shoplifting epidemic.
In English law it is simply theft, and shoplifting is the everyday name rather than a separate offence. Shops call the loss shrinkage, which also covers damage and staff theft. Note shoplifter, the person; and that shoplifting has risen sharply in Britain since about 2022, which has made the word a fixture in news reporting and in arguments about policing and poverty.
1nounshopliftingSecretly taking goods from a shop without paying.
“Shoplifting in that street has about tripled in four years.”
shoplifting is a form of theft.
The word is shop plus lift, where lift has meant to steal since at least the sixteenth century — the same sense as in shoplift and in the informal lifted, meaning taken. Shoplifting is recorded from the 1670s.
by surface analysis, shoplift + -ing. The noun sense (from 1690) predates the verb.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA