thief
Pluralthieves
- 1A person who steals another's property, especially quietly and without using force or violence.
The thief picked the lock and made off with the silverware before dawn.
Several thieves had been emptying lockers at the gym for weeks.
Similarburglar, pilferer, crook
Note
Here the weight falls on how the taking is done: quietly, by stealth, without force. That is the line usually drawn between a thief and a robber, whose taking involves force or the threat of it. A pickpocket is a thief; a mugger is a robber. When the manner does not matter, the general sense covers both. Thomas Tusser's verse warns the householder to keep watch "least theeues destroie thee."
- 2A person who commits theft, taking what belongs to another.
The jury found the thief guilty on all counts.
Thieves stripped the abandoned building of its copper wiring.
Note
The broadest sense is also an old one. It comes from Old English þēof and passed through Middle English thef and theef with little change in meaning. Its plural keeps the old f-to-v shift, thieves, as leaves and wolves do. Compounds name a thief by what or where he steals. Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice has water-thieves and land-thieves, and the pattern stays open for new coinages.
- 3A flaw in a candle's wick that causes the flame to gutter and waste the wax or tallow.
A thief in the wick guttered the flame and sent tallow streaming down the candle's side.
By midnight a thief had wasted most of the candle, leaving only a puddle of fat.
Note
A household image long out of use: whatever wasted a candle's wax was itself called a thief. The usual phrasing was a thief in the candle. Joseph Hall's Divine Light (1640) turns it into a sermon figure, asking whether one should call for an extinguisher on seeing a thief in the candle. Readers of older texts should expect it there and not mistake it for a person.
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Origin
From Middle English thef (also theef, þef), from Old English þēof, from Proto-West Germanic *þeub, from Proto-Germanic *þeubaz.