pickpocket

• pick-pocket

From pick +‎ pocket.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈpɪkpɒkɪt/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

pickpocket (plural pickpockets)

1. One who steals from the pocket of a passerby, usually by sleight of hand.

   Coordinate term: putpocket

   • 1874, Marcus Clarke, For the Term of his Natural Life, Penguin, published 2009, page 52:

     Old men, young men, and boys, stalwart burglars and highway robbers, slept side by side with wizened pickpockets or cunning-featured area-sneaks.

   • 1970, Saul Bellow, chapter 1, in Mr. Sammler’s Planet‎^[1], Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, published 1971, page 8:

     For several days, Mr. Sammler returning on the customary bus late afternoons from the Forty-second Street Library had been watching a pickpocket at work […] Mr. Sammler if he had not been a tall straphanger would not with his one good eye have seen these things happening.

• See Thesaurus:pickpocket

pickpocket (third-person singular simple present pickpockets, present participle pickpocketing, simple past and past participle pickpocketed)

1. (transitive) To pick pockets; to steal.
   • 2014 November 22, Miles Brignall, “Victory against Vodafone for schoolteacher billed £15,000”, in The Guardian‎^[2]:

     Vodafone has also dropped its claim against one of Rhys Edwards’s travelling companions – who had been at the same reunion and had his phone pickpocketed two hours later in almost identical circumstances to Rhys Edwards.

• reverse-pickpocket

From English pickpocket.

• IPA^(key): /pik.pɔ.kɛt/

• Audio:

  (file)

pickpocket m (plural pickpockets)

1. pickpocket

   Synonym: voleur à la tire

   Hypernym: voleur

• “pickpocket”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.
• “pickpocket” in Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 1872–1877.