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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
purloin
verb
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Thieves purloined about $4 million in jewels from the mansion.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Purloin

Purloin \Pur*loin"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Purloined; p. pr. & vb. n. Purloining.] [OF. purloignier, porloignier, to retard, delay; pur, por, pour, for (L. pro) + loin far, far off (L. longe). See Prolong, and cf. Eloign.] To take or carry away for one's self; hence, to steal; to take by theft; to filch.

Had from his wakeful custody purloined The guarded gold.
--Milton.

when did the muse from Fletcher scenes purloin ?
--Dryden.

Purloin

Purloin \Pur*loin"\, v. i. To practice theft; to steal.
--Titus ii. 10.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
purloin

mid-14c., "remove, misappropriate," from Anglo-French purloigner "remove," Old French porloigner "put off, retard, delay, drag out; be far away," from por- (from Latin pro- "forth;" see pro-) + Old French loing "far," from Latin longe, from longus (see long (adj.)). Sense of "to steal" (1540s) is a development in English. Related: Purloined; purloining.

Wiktionary
purloin

vb. (context transitive English) To take the property of another, often in breach of trust; to appropriate wrongfully; to steal.

WordNet
purloin

v. make off with belongings of others [syn: pilfer, cabbage, pinch, abstract, snarf, swipe, hook, sneak, filch, nobble, lift]

Usage examples of "purloin".

Two Borzoi submarines were completed in late 1991 using purloined stealth technology.

Hertz purloined those ideas as his own, Punning did not say anything about it.

So as soon as she was romping around the sands of her pen, he began getting her used to a weight on her back, improvising a harness and a small sandbag at first, then when he discovered where the dragonet harnesses were kept, purloining one and using that.

Florian to help, but the idea of purloining a uniform gave him another notion.

I applied these tests and they convinced me that Poole knows nothing about the purloining or the setting of the man-trap.

It was only then that I saw he had purloined a Benedictine habit as his costume for the morality play.

After the last firing, the unremembered night-hours to Hamburg, the hop from Hamburg to Bydgoszcz in a purloined P-51 Mustang was so clearly Procalowski-down-out-of-the-sky-in-a-machine, that Thanatz came to imagine he had disposed of Blicero too only in that same very conditional, metallic way.

She glanced at Tyber to signal him, but the Doc was watching Hambone as he pranced with his prize piece of chicken to the corner of the room to dine alone with the purloined goods.

With the use of Talent, the sphere is purloined from the system and sent on its way to the League, thus giving the Alliance a relatively undamaged Hiver spaceship for Mrdini and Human engineers to examine.

Feeling audacious, Ishmael withdrew the purloined logbooks and held them out.

The record further shows that every purloined article is still in your possessions.

At the same time I remembered the visit of that lad, who had never been in my house before, and how he might have glanced into the drawing-room through accident, and seeing my souvenir spoons, been tempted to purloin one.

Downtown was doing its usual split-personality routine: Fasttalking, fast-walking Power Dressers, Wannabee Tycoons, and stifflipped secretaries sharing turf with bleary-eyed, filth-encrusted human shells transporting their life stories in purloined shopping carts and verminous bedrolls.

Handel purloined wholesale from brother composers and said nothing about it.

Although such a question is meaningless to a person with any honor, reply that everything is the personal possession of Sazac Dega, otherwise these mainlanders purloin anything not actually nailed down.