What is "pilfer"

Usage examples of "pilfer".

And thereat none need marvaile if they consider the cause and reason, which was this: whilst the ships stayed, our allowance was somewhat bettered, by a daily proportion of Bisket, which the sailors would pilfer to sell, give, or exchange with us for money, Saxefras, furres, or love.

In some cases, it might be cheaper to offer them a cushy, corporate-style retirement than to keep them hanging around, so they can continue pilfering from government coffers.

The prize which he had come to steal was set in the very midst of the treasures which he had already pilfered and which he thought were safely held in the custody of Foon Koo!

Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset last left it last.

The Seigneury of Pontiac belongs to Monsieur Racine, and but three days since Madame here dismissed this fellow for pilfering and other misdemeanours.

I am lodged in the old Dutch Stadthaus, formerly the residence of the Dutch Governor, and which has enough of solitude and faded stateliness to be fearsome, or at the least eerie, to a solitary guest like myself, to whose imagination, in the long, dark nights, creeping Malays or pilfering Chinamen are far more likely to present themselves than the stiff beauties and formal splendors of the heyday of Dutch ascendancy.

A sizzling bolt scorched the air and struck the hilltop square on the chief vizar and his pilfered scepter.

Wielding a cane and a clapper with which to call people to attention, he also was constable, judge and jury, fining malefactors who got into drunken fights or were caught pilfering.

Thy witty wiles to draw, and get The lark into the trammel net: Thou hast thy cockrood, and thy glade To take the precious pheasant made: Thy lime-twigs, snares, and pit-falls then To catch the pilfering birds, not men.

The bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea decorate their courting grounds with everything from beetle wings to pilfered car keys.

They were partly hidden under a thin black silk shawl, and Gertrude began to think her companion had been on a pilfering expedition.

Is it so surprising that Leucon, in his frustration, should become bewildered and confused, should lose his sense of the distinction, a valid distinction as I am the first to agree, between pilfering and pillage?

It was the inn that is in every provincial faubourg, with large stables and small bedrooms, where one sees in the middle of the court chickens pilfering the oats under the muddy gigs of the commercial travellers--a good old house, with worm-eaten balconies that creak in the wind on winter nights, always full of people, noise, and feeding, whose black tables are sticky with coffee and brandy, the thick windows made yellow by the flies, the damp napkins stained with cheap wine, and that always smells of the village, like ploughboys dressed in Sundayclothes, has a cafe on the street, and towards the countryside a kitchen-garden.

There were many such, for the Sawtooth, powerful and stern against outlawry, tolerated no pilfering from their thousands.

Someone like Ralph, with all the appropriate yuppified attributes, had never done anything more illegal than cheating on his taxes or pilfering from the office.