• plagiarize •
Pronunciation: play-jêr-raiz • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: Artistic theft, to copy the words or ideas, music or designs of another person and to represent them as one's own.
Notes: Here is a word that has traveled far and wide semantically (see Word History). It comes with an action and result noun, plagiarism, and and two personal nouns plagiarist and plagiarizer. Plagarism seems to have replaced its synonym plagiary, though the latter is still around, waiting to be used. Watch out for the Z and S dance.
In Play: Plagiarism is artistic theft: "Les Cheatham played the ears of his fans by plagiarizing something from every tune he heard." In his song "Lobachevsky", Tom Lehrer wrote: "I will never forget the day I met the great Lobachevsky. In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize!" Les Cheatham has been accused of plagiarizing himself.
Word History: Today's Good Word was created in the early 17th century by combining plagiary + -ize. Plagiary is a modification of Latin plagiarius "kidnapper", the noun for plagiare "to kidnap", a verb derived from the noun plaga "(hunting) net". Plaga seems to have come from PIE plag- "flat, flatten", traces of which we find in Greek plax, plakos "flat, plain" and pelagos "open sea", Latvian plakans "flat", Russian ploskii "flat", Polish płaski "flat", Czech plocha "surface, flat area", and Dutch vlak "flat". (Now a gracious nod to our old friend Philadelphian Jackie Strauss for spotting today's semantically traveling Good Word.)
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