One who takes or seizes; a person engaged in the act of capturing or seizing something.
From Latin captans, the present participle of capere meaning 'to take.' It describes someone actively engaged in the process of capturing or seizing.
Medieval Latin documents used captans to describe people in the act of taking things—soldiers, tax collectors, anyone in the business of seizing property—making it a snapshot of dynamic action frozen in a word form.
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