Stolen

How to spell stolen

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce stolen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stolen mean?

1. verbPast participle of steal: taken away dishonestly or without the owner's permission.

Stolen in a sentence

• The police recovered the stolen bicycle from a warehouse.

• Her purse was stolen from the cafe table while she paid at the counter.

Where does stolen come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Stolen is the past participle of the verb steal, which comes from the Old English stelan, meaning to take something secretly and without permission. This was a native Germanic verb, with close relatives across the family such as the Dutch stelen and the German stehlen, all tracing back to a shared Germanic root for taking by stealth. The strong verb pattern, in which the vowel changes through the forms (steal, stole, stolen) rather than simply adding -ed, is an inheritance from this ancient Germanic conjugation, and it is exactly why the spelling shifts to that -en ending rather than a regular past tense. The same instinct for quiet, hidden action survives in the related word stealth. Because the word has been part of everyday English from its earliest records, it has never needed borrowing from Latin or French, and its spelling has stayed remarkably stable over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• stol- (root of steal, to take wrongfully)
• -en (past participle suffix)