Other forms: stolen, steals, stealing, stole
To steal is to take something that is not yours, without permission and against the law. Steal a car, steal from a shop, somebody stole my bike. It is irregular: steal, stole, stolen.
The construction is worth care: you steal something from somebody, and you rob a person or a place. So a thief steals money and robs a bank, and steal a bank is wrong. Two extended senses are common: to steal a glance or a kiss is to take it quickly and unnoticed, and to steal away is to leave quietly. In sport, to steal is to take possession unexpectedly, and steal the show means to draw all the attention.
1verbstealTo take something that belongs to somebody else.
“Somebody stole the lead off the church roof.”
2verbquicklyTo do something quickly and unnoticed.
“She stole a glance at the clock.”
3verbmoveTo move quietly so as not to be noticed.
“He stole out of the room while they were arguing.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
steal is a way of taking.
Also accepted in games: rob
Old English stelan is shared across the Germanic languages and has no clear ancestor beyond them. The quiet-movement sense — stealing away, stealth, stealthy — comes from the same word and preserves what may be the older idea: doing something unseen, rather than taking.
Middle English
stelen
English, today
steal
From Middle English stelen. Cognate with bar stöhn (“to steal”), Dutch stelen (“to steal”), German and Low German stehlen (“to steal”), lb stielen (“to steal”), Danish stjæle (“to steal”), Faroese stjala (“to steal”), Icelandic stela (“to steal”), Norwegian Bokmål stjele (“to steal”), Norwegian Nynorsk stela, stele (“to steal”), Swedish stjäla (“to steal”), Gothic 𐍃𐍄𐌹𐌻𐌰𐌽 (“to steal”). For the meaning development compare with Russian красть (“to steal”) and Russian кра́сться (“to stalk, to prowl, to slink”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA