Other forms: smuggling, smuggled, smuggles
To smuggle something is to carry it secretly past someone whose job is to stop it. Cigarettes taped under a car seat at the border; a bag of sweets smuggled into the cinema in a coat pocket.
The serious use is about borders and customs — smuggling drugs, weapons, cash, wildlife. The goods are contraband, the person is a smuggler, and the crime is smuggling. The light use is everywhere too: you smuggle a dog into a hotel room, or smuggle your phone into an exam. It takes a direction nearly every time — smuggle something in, out, into, across, past. When people are the cargo, English calls it people smuggling, which is not the same as trafficking: smuggled people have paid to be moved, trafficked people are taken and exploited.
1verbsmuggleTo take goods or people secretly and illegally across a border.
“They were caught trying to smuggle rare birds through the airport.”
2verbsneakTo take something somewhere secretly, where it is not allowed.
“She smuggled a paperback into the lecture and read it under the desk.”
synonyms: sneak
The word came off the North Sea trading coast. English first said smuckle, borrowed from Dutch smokkelen or Low German smuggeln, and all of them go back to Proto-West Germanic smeugan, "to creep, to slip through". The picture in the root is not theft but slipping through a gap.
Dutch
smokkelen
English, today
smuggle
From smuckle, from Dutch smokkelen. From earlier smuckle, either from Dutch smokkelen (“to smuggle”), a frequentative form of Middle Dutch smugen (“to act secretly, be sneaky”), from Old Dutch smugan, or from nds-nl - or German Low German smuggeln; all are from Proto-West Germanic smeugan (“to creep; slip through or into”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA