thief

Other forms of thief

plural

thieves

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about thief

What does thief mean?

thief means "a criminal who takes property belonging to someone else with the intention of keeping it or selling it".

How many syllables are in thief?

thief has 1 syllable: thief. In IPA it is /ˈθif/.

What is another word for thief?

Close synonyms include stealer. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is thief a common word?

thief is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.