Steal
verbTo take someone else's property dishonestly and without permission.
How to spell steal
5 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce steal
What does steal mean?
- verbTo take someone else's property dishonestly and without permission.
- verbTo move somewhere quietly and unnoticed.
Steal in a sentence
-
The thieves planned to steal the jewellery from the locked display.
-
She tried to steal out of the meeting before anyone noticed.
-
It is a crime to steal money from your employer.
-
He would often steal a quick glance at his phone during dinner.
Where does steal come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Steal comes from the Old English verb stelan, which meant 'to take away secretly or without permission', and it traces back to a reconstructed Proto-Germanic form stelan that gave German stehlen and Dutch stelen the same sense. It has always been a strong verb, which is why its past tense is the irregular 'stole' and its past participle 'stolen' rather than a tidy 'stealed'. The figurative uses, such as stealing a glance or stealing away quietly, grew out of the core idea of doing something quietly and unnoticed. Its close sound-alike 'steel', the hard metal, comes from a completely different Old English word, style, so the two share no ancestry despite sounding identical. Keeping that history in mind helps: steal with an 'a' is the act of taking, while steel with two 'e' letters is the metal.
How the word is built
- steal (from Old English stelan: to take wrongfully), a strong verb with no prefix or suffix
Words that sound like steal
They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.
- steel: A hard, strong alloy of iron and carbon used in construction and tools.
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.