English Online Dictionary. What means steal? What does steal mean?
English
Etymology
From Middle English stelen, from Old English stelan, from Proto-West Germanic *stelan, from Proto-Germanic *stelaną.
Compare West Frisian stelle, Low German stehlen, Dutch stelen, German stehlen, Danish stjæle, Swedish stjäla, Norwegian Bokmål stjele, Norwegian Nynorsk stela, Sanskrit स्तेय (steya); see below for more.
For the meaning development compare with Russian красть (krastʹ, “to steal”) and Russian кра́сться (krástʹsja, “to stalk, to prowl, to slink”).
Pronunciation
- enPR: stēl, IPA(key): /stiːl/
- Homophones: steel, stele
- Rhymes: -iːl
Verb
steal (third-person singular simple present steals, present participle stealing, simple past stole, past participle stolen or (nonstandard, colloquial) stole)
- (transitive) To take illegally, or without the owner's permission, something owned by someone else without intending to return it.
- (transitive, of ideas, words, music, a look, credit, etc.) To appropriate without giving credit or acknowledgement.
- (transitive) To get or effect surreptitiously or artfully.
- (transitive, informal, figurative) To acquire at a low price.
- (transitive) To draw attention unexpectedly in (an entertainment), especially by being the outstanding performer. Usually used in the phrase steal the show.
- (intransitive) To move silently or secretly.
- (transitive) To convey (something) clandestinely.
- To withdraw or convey (oneself) clandestinely.
- (transitive, baseball) To advance safely to (another base) during the delivery of a pitch, without the aid of a hit, walk, passed ball, wild pitch, or defensive indifference.
- (sports, transitive) To dispossess
- (informal, transitive, hyperbolic) To borrow for a short moment.
- (informal, transitive, humorous) take, plagiarize, tell on a joke, use a well-worded expression in one's own parlance or writing
Synonyms
- (to illegally take possession of): See Thesaurus:steal
- (to secretly move): sneak
Antonyms
- (acquire licitly) receive, purchase, buy, earn
- (provide freely) donate, bestow, grant
Troponyms
- shoplift
Derived terms
Translations
See also
Noun
steal (plural steals)
- The act of stealing.
- (slang, figurative) A piece of merchandise available at a very low, attractive price; the act of buying it.
- Antonym: rip-off
- Near-synonyms: bargain, good value, value for money
- (basketball, ice hockey) A situation in which a defensive player actively takes possession of the ball or puck from the opponent's team.
- (baseball) A stolen base.
- (curling) Scoring in an end without the hammer.
- (computing) A policy in database systems that a database follows which allows a transaction to be written on nonvolatile storage before its commit occurs.
Translations
References
Anagrams
- setal, ETLAs, tesla, telas, Astle, tales, least, Tesla, salet, slate, Teals, stela, astel, Slate, Sleat, lates, leats, 'least, laste, teals, stale, taels