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Allin

felony

nouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈfɛləni//

A serious criminal offense, which, under United States federal law, is punishable by a term of imprisonment of not less than one year or by the death penalty in the most serious offenses.

noun

  1. 1

    historicalA serious criminal offense, which, under United States federal law, is punishable by a term of imprisonment of not less than one year or by the death penalty in the most serious offenses.

    There ſhall be in England, ſeuen halfe peny Loaues ſold for a peny: the three hoop'd pot, ſhall haue ten hoopes, and I vvill make it Fellony to drink ſmall Beere.

    First, as felony prosecutor, I prosecute high-level felonies including homicides; sexual assaults; child endangerings; shootings and other felonious assaults; and media cases.

    Jordan Gee, 37, of Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, was charged with three felony counts of threats against the president and one count of interstate threats, according to the Justice Department.

    Many experts have also expressed skepticism about the significance of this case and its legal underpinnings, which employed an unusual legal theory to seek a felony charge for what is more commonly a misdemeanor, and Mr. Trump will undoubtedly seek an appeal.

Etymology

From Middle English felony, felonie, from Old French felonie (“evil, immoral deed”), from felon (“evildoer”). Ultimately of Proto-Germanic origin. More at felon. By surface analysis, felon + -y.

Forms

plural
felonies
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).