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OneKitly

kidnap

verbnouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈkɪdnæp//

To seize or detain a person unlawfully and move or conceal them; sometimes for ransom.

verb

  1. 1

    To seize or detain a person unlawfully and move or conceal them; sometimes for ransom.

    Hello, ladies! How’s the Big Apple? Rotten, Jerry! Clover's been kidnapped! Oh, dear! That's the second time this month!

    Angrest, a soldier, was kidnapped from his tank at the Nahal Oz base when it was attacked by Hamas.

Etymology

From kid + nap (“to nab; to grab”). Originally Thieves' cant, referring to the practice of stealing children and shipping them to colonies or plantations as laborers. First attested c. 1680.

noun

  1. 1

    The crime, or an instance, of kidnapping.

Forms

plural
kidnaps
past tense
kidnapped, kidnaped
past participle
kidnapped, kidnaped
present participle
kidnapping, kidnaping
third person singular
kidnaps
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).