What's the difference between filch and thieve?

Filch


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To steal or take privily (commonly, that which is of little value); to pilfer.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It's almost as if I watched old Jethro Tull at the cash machine and leaned over his shoulder as he put his credit card into the machine to check out his PIN and filched his credit card form from his back pocket as he walked away and then fleeced his bank account."
  • (2) I stammered out a few one-liners I’d written, and a couple of bits about being short largely filched from Ronnie Corbett.
  • (3) They filch public funds and flush the effluent from their own monuments into the same local infrastructure they beggar with tax breaks and bond issues.
  • (4) Darling will rightly reject George Osborne's calls for immediate tax rises or cuts in public spending to reduce the budget deficit but he should consider filching the shadow chancellor's proposal for an Office of Budget Responsibility, only with a different mandate from that proposed by the Conservatives.
  • (5) As ever with Murdoch, there is a sound business reason for attacking a company that has filched so much advertising revenue from newspaper groups such as News UK (as well as other newspaper groups of course).
  • (6) The drum break on her 1979 album track Our Love was filched for the beginning of New Order's Blue Monday , who also put the epic Patrick Cowley mix of I Feel Love on their Back to Mine compilation.
  • (7) "The Fed's current policy is based on the same presumption as its policy in the decade prior to 2007, that the smart thing to do is to filch an advantage that has not been earned.
  • (8) But the filching is so affectionate that you can't resent it.
  • (9) Hilton wrote in the Observer : “Surely we should be fighting corruption in the world, not feeding it with fat contracts that filch the earnings of British taxpayers to fund the lavish lifestyles of sleazy Chinese elites.” Apart from human rights, the state visit may be overshadowed by a sharp slowdown in Chinese growth – something that is likely have a major impact on the global economy and especially on the UK, as the largest European investor in China and the largest destination in Europe for China’s outward investment.
  • (10) Photograph: Frank Martin It’s the same sense of fairness that means that, sometimes in the cracks, while writing about other things, he takes time to punctiliously acknowledge his influences – Alan Coren , for example, who pioneered so many of the techniques of short humour that Terry and I have filched over the years; or the glorious, overstuffed, heady thing that is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and its compiler, t he Rev E Cobham Brewer , that most serendipitious of authors.
  • (11) Chaplin’s granddaughter Kathleen, a singer, was there with her seven-year-old son Jaydn – and said he was already filching her iPhone to make films.
  • (12) Yet again, the British Conservatives – equally seduced a few years ago by Australia’s tough, points based immigration system – have filched policy from their former colony (and major migrant outpost) – to score a few cheap, political points in the year before a tough election.
  • (13) We remember John Hersey’s Hiroshima dispatch ; we forget that he filched copy from a James Agee biography.
  • (14) I'm A Celebrity contestant Janice Dickinson called him the lowest form of pond scum, Radar magazine's profile on him was titled Sultan of Sleeze, while blogging site Gawker said he was a "schlocky managing editor of a thieving celebrity news conglomerate" and accused him of filching stories from the website Courthouse News Service and passing them off as their own.

Thieve


Definition:

  • (v. t. & i.) To practice theft; to steal.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He shrugs his shoulders and laughs: "And they call us thieves!"
  • (2) Extensive research among the Afghan National Army – 68 focus groups – and US military personnel alike concluded: "One group sees the other as a bunch of violent, reckless, intrusive, arrogant, self-serving profane, infidel bullies hiding behind high technology; and the other group [the US soldiers] generally views the former as a bunch of cowardly, incompetent, obtuse, thieving, complacent, lazy, pot-smoking, treacherous, and murderous radicals.
  • (3) Protected by a rusty padlocked gate, Macrinus's tomb was targeted by thieves after it was first excavated in 2008.
  • (4) Rising numbers of consumers are finding they are subject to thieves who tamper with their gas and electricity meters to redirect some of their supply.
  • (5) My suspicion is there was something [the thieves] were specifically after, otherwise why would they have taken some and left others?” The stolen goods would range from family heirlooms, personal jewellery and dealers’ stock, he said.
  • (6) Capitalism has brought job insecurity and economic instability, and given power to those who are good at thieving.
  • (7) The agreement that the International Atomic Energy Agency reached with Iran is a pact among thieves.
  • (8) In Thursday's robbery the thieves all fled the scene within minutes.
  • (9) It was like a bomb went off in the room.” Arrest the thieves and embezzlers who are plundering Iraq | Letters Read more Abadi has placed much of his political stock on his reform drive, which he sees as essential to holding the country together.
  • (10) US officers in Daytona Beach in 2010 were able to prevent a car burglary after one of the thieves "butt-dialed" the police halfway through the crime.
  • (11) They were soon able to verify their authenticity and, retracing the paintings' steps, they decided that the works in all probability were taken by the thieves by train from Paris to Turin, but were abandoned on board, possibly during border checks.
  • (12) Within hours of their death, Egyptian authorities accused them of being part of a gang of thieves that targeted foreigners, and an alleged house raid linked them to a heinous act : the torture and murder of an Italian researcher named Giulio Regeni .
  • (13) The activity of burglars more often then the thieves' one goes over into the night.
  • (14) "Did you expect something different from these crooks and thieves?
  • (15) Surely, she of all people doesn’t need to be told what happened to the Labour party in Scotland when, during the independence referendum, it fell among thieves and started spending too much time with social delinquents?
  • (16) There was fine work from the Dardenne brothers – their Le Gamin au Vélo was a modern reworking of Oliver Twist and Bicycle Thieves .
  • (17) Football also evolves, just as the world, cars, computers do, so you have to keep evolving and immersing yourself in those changes.” It was telling that in April, when thieves broke into his parked car and stole various personal belongings, not only did he lose a contacts book with 20 years’ worth of professional associates, but also an iPad containing a draft of the football book he is working on.
  • (18) They exhibited no wider cause or motivation beyond miserable thieving.
  • (19) Tesco Bank cyber-thieves stole £2.5m from 9,000 people Read more Fraser McKevitt, head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar, said the discounters were being hit as they were now up against very strong rates of growth a year ago, while Tesco’s resurgence had made life more difficult.
  • (20) In her day this was a gritty neighbourhood and it hasn’t changed much, with a shabby market by the metro station and blocks of peeling townhouses; this is the real, old Paris, the world she sang about, with its desperate cast of thieves and tramps and lovers.