Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A pirate.
  • noun A slender cylindrical tin can, 9 or 10 inches long and from l½ to 2 inches thick, furnished with a bail, used to draw water from a cask through the bung-hole; a bung-bucket: so called because it is sometimes used by sailors to steal water when on short allowance.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Manji or Hanji, A Kashmiri water-thief or boatman.

    A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil T. R. Swinburne

  • By some of the dark ingenuities of that age of priestcraft a curious thing was discovered -- that if you kill every usurer, every forestaller, every adulterater, every user of false weights, every fixer of false boundaries, every land-thief, every water-thief, you afterwards discover by a strange indirect miracle, or disconnected truth from heaven, that you have no millionaires.

    The Crimes of England 1905

  • I warrant you, now, that water-thief began his iniquities by riding the neighbors 'horses, at night.

    The Water-witch, Or, the Skimmer of the Seas 1831

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