Heist

How to spell heist

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce heist

What does heist mean?

1. nounA robbery, especially a planned and daring theft of money or valuables.
2. verbTo steal something, typically in a bold or large-scale robbery.

Heist in a sentence

• noun

  The gang spent months planning the bank heist.

• verb

  The thieves planned to heist the payroll before the guards arrived.

• noun

  Police are still investigating the diamond heist at the gallery.

• verb

  They tried to heist several paintings during the night.

Where does heist come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

Heist began life as a slang reshaping of the older verb 'hoist', meaning to lift or raise something up, which itself came into late medieval English from a Germanic source related to Dutch 'hijsen' and Low German 'hissen', both meaning 'to raise or haul up'. American underworld and police slang of the early twentieth century twisted the pronunciation of 'hoist' toward 'heist', and the word took on the narrow criminal sense of lifting goods that do not belong to you, in other words a robbery. The spelling followed the new pronunciation, giving the unusual 'ei' that trips writers up, since the sound is the long 'i' of 'eye' rather than the 'ee' of most 'ei' words. By the mid 1900s the word had spread into newspapers and crime fiction on both sides of the Atlantic, especially for daring, planned thefts of cash or jewels. The hidden link to 'hoist' is the best memory aid: a heist is something thieves 'hoist away', and both words share that lifting idea.

How the word is built

• heist (single root, a dialectal variant of 'hoist')