The act or practice of stealing things that belong to other people.
From Old English 'theof' (thief) plus the suffix '-ery' meaning 'practice or behavior of.' The root likely comes from Proto-Germanic and is related to words meaning 'to seize or grasp.'
Thievery has been around so long that it appears in some of the oldest English texts—humans have probably had a word for stealing since we first invented the concept of ownership! The suffix '-ery' is magical because it turns actions into nouns, the same way 'bake' becomes 'bakery.'
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