Plunder

How to spell plunder

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce plunder

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does plunder mean?

1. verbTo steal goods from a place or person by force, especially during war or unrest.
2. nounGoods or money taken by force or theft.

Plunder in a sentence

• verb

  The invading army began to plunder every village along the coast.

• noun

  The pirates divided the plunder among the crew before nightfall.

• verb

  Thieves broke in overnight to plunder the warehouse of its stock.

• noun

  Much of the museum's plunder was eventually returned to its rightful owners.

Where does plunder come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Plunder came into English in the early 1600s from the German verb plündern, which meant to rob someone of their household goods. That verb grew from the Middle High German noun plunder, which originally referred to nothing more dramatic than household effects, bedclothes, and rags, the ordinary stuff a family kept at home. The grim shift in meaning happened during the Thirty Years' War, when soldiers tramping across Germany stripped homes of exactly those goods, and English-speaking troops returning from the Continent carried the word back with them. Within a generation it had settled into English to mean seizing goods by force, especially in war, and then more loosely any greedy taking. The journey from cosy household linens to wholesale theft is a neat reminder that the word is spelled with a plain -er ending, never -or, despite sounding the same.

How the word is built

• plunder (from German plündern: to rob of household goods); used in English as both verb and noun