Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The unlawful taking and removing of another's personal property with the intent of permanently depriving the owner; theft.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In law, the wrongful or fraudulent taking and carrying away, by any person and from any place, of the mere personal goods of another, with a felonious intent to convert them to the taker's own use, and make them his own property, without the consent of the owner; theft. East.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Law) The unlawful taking and carrying away of things personal with intent to deprive the right owner of the same; theft. Cf. embezzlement.
  • noun distinctions having reference to the nature or value of the property stolen. They are abolished in England.
  • noun that which, under statute, includes in it the aggravation of a taking from a building or the person.
  • noun that which is not accompanied with any aggravating circumstances.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun law The unlawful taking of personal property as an attempt to deprive the legal owner of it permanently.
  • noun law A larcenous act attributable to an individual.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the act of taking something from someone unlawfully

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Anglo-Norman larcin, theft, from Latin latrōcinium, robbery, from latrō, robber, mercenary, ultimately from Greek latron, pay, hire.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Coined between 1425 and 1475 from Anglo-Norman larcin ("theft"), from Latin latrocinium ("robbery"), from latro ("robber, mercenary"), from Ancient Greek λάτρον ("pay, hire")

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Examples

  • For example, an officer who wanted to hide a grand larceny, which is counted as an index crime and as such would affect the city's crime rate, could classify the crime as a petite larceny, a statistic that is not counted as part of the official crime rate.

    Police in About-Face on City Crime Data Sean Gardiner 2010

  • Stealing without administering fear is called larceny, stealing by administering fear is called robbery, the keyword here is “steal.”

    O.J. Trial: Prosecution testimony denied 2008

  • He was convicted instead of grand larceny, that is, of stealing his bonuses, which were certainly oversized.

    Free Dennis Kozlowski 2007

  • Judge Rafalsky held, for instance, that if a crime had been committed at all, it was not that known as larceny, and he went on to add:

    The Financier 2004

  • When Stores could not, they were prone to steal vegetables, melons and poultry from the convicts, a transgression Ross punished as severely as if the larceny were the other way around.

    Morgan’s Run Colleen McCullough 2000

  • When Stores could not, they were prone to steal vegetables, melons and poultry from the convicts, a transgression Ross punished as severely as if the larceny were the other way around.

    Morgan’s Run Colleen McCullough 2000

  • _But besides simple larceny, which is divided into grand and petty, there is a mixed larceny which has a greater degree of guilt in it, as being a taking from the person of a man or from his house.

    Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences Arthur L. Hayward

  • I said, "Well, I'm a scout, and I don't call larceny grand."

    Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike Percy Keese Fitzhugh 1913

  • Judge Rafalsky held, for instance, that if a crime had been committed at all, it was not that known as larceny, and he went on to add:

    The Financier, a novel Theodore Dreiser 1908

  • Camelopards, he declared that such a larceny was a moral impossibility, because he had never seen one such animal in the whole course of his life.

    The Voyage of Captain Popanilla Benjamin Disraeli 1842

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