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thief

UK/ˈθiːf/US/ˈθiːf/
nounA2Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,310 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: thieves

A thief is somebody who takes what belongs to others. Catch a thief, a car thief, thieves broke in overnight.

The plural is thieves, which is the standard f-to-v change. English distinguishes carefully in law: a thief steals, a burglar breaks into a building, a robber uses force or threat, and a shoplifter takes from a shop. Those are not synonyms in a courtroom. Note the proverb there is honour among thieves, and thick as thieves, meaning very close friends — both suggesting a solidarity the law does not recognise.

Definitions of thief

  1. 1nounthiefSomebody who steals.A2

    “The thief was caught on three separate cameras.”

    synonyms: robber, burglar, shoplifter

thief is a criminal.

Also accepted in games: robber, burglar

Phrases it lives in

  • thick as thieves — extremely close, and probably up to something together

Where it comes from

Old English theof is shared across the Germanic languages and has no certain older ancestor. It is one of the small set of words for wrongdoing that English never replaced with a French or Latin borrowing, which is unusual for a legal term.

  1. Proto-Germanic

    *þeubaz

  2. Proto-West Germanic

    *þeub

  3. Old English

    þēof

  4. Middle English

    thef

  5. English, today

    thief

From Middle English thef, theef, þef, from Old English þēof, from Proto-West Germanic þeub, from Proto-Germanic þeubaz. Cognate with stq Tjoof (“thief”), West Frisian tsjeaf (“thief”), Dutch dief (“thief”), Low German Deef, Deev (“thief”), German Dieb (“thief”), Danish tyv (“thief”), Swedish tjuv (“thief”), Icelandic þjófur (“thief”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Crime & Law

Practise this word

thief in the wild

  • Adapted from One Thousand and One Nights, the film tells the story of a thief who falls in love with the daughter of the Caliph of Baghdad.

    The Thief of Bagdad (1924 film)

  • A gentleman thief, gentleman burglar, lady thief, or phantom thief is a stock character in fiction.

    Gentleman thief

  • The rogue, formerly known as the thief, is one of the standard playable character classes in most editions of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game.

    Rogue (Dungeons & Dragons)

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.