Stole

How to spell stole

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stole

What does stole mean?

1. verbPast tense of steal: took something that belonged to someone else, without permission.
2. nounA long scarf or band of fabric or fur worn around the shoulders, or the strip a priest wears around the neck.

Stole in a sentence

• verb

  Someone stole her bicycle from outside the office.

• noun

  She draped a fur stole over her evening gown.

• verb

  The cashier admitted she stole money from the till.

• noun

  The priest adjusted the embroidered stole around his neck before the service.

Where does stole come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This single spelling carries two quite separate histories. As the past tense of steal it descends from the Old English verb stelan, meaning 'to take secretly or wrongfully', a thoroughly Germanic word with cousins in Dutch stelen and German stehlen; the past form once varied between stæl and stælon before settling into the modern stole. The noun stole, by contrast, is a borrowing of the Latin stola, a long robe or garment, which Latin itself took from the Greek stolē meaning 'equipment, array, or clothing', built on the verb stellein 'to arrange or make ready'. In the Roman world a stola was the dignified outer dress of a married woman, and the church later adopted the term for the narrow band a priest wears around the neck. By the time English speakers used stole for a woman's fur or fabric wrap across the shoulders, the two strands had long converged on the same four letters, which is why one short word covers both a theft and a garment.

How the word is built

• stole = past tense of the verb steal (Old English stelan); the unrelated noun comes whole from Latin stola, with no internal prefix or suffix