pickery

From pick (“to steal”), or perhaps from pickeer.

• IPA^(key): /ˈpɪkəɹi/
• Rhymes: -ɪkəɹi

pickery (plural pickeries)

1. A place where cotton is picked.
2. (Scotland, archaic) petty theft
   • 1577, Raphaell Holinshed, The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande […], volume I, London: […] [Henry Bynneman] for Iohn Harrison, →OCLC:

     If any man be taken with theft or pickery, and thereof convicted, he shall have his head polled, and hot pitch poured upon his pate […]

• “pickery”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.