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loot

nounverbnounnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//luːt//
  • Canada//lut//
  • Australia//ɫʉːt//

Synonym of booty, goods seized from an enemy by violence, particularly (historical) during the sacking of a town in war or (video games) after successful combat.

noun

  1. 1

    Synonym of booty, goods seized from an enemy by violence, particularly (historical) during the sacking of a town in war or (video games) after successful combat.

    Loot, plunder, pillage.

    He always found the talismanic gathering-word Loot (plunder), a sufficient bond of union in any part of India.

    Why, the race [of camp followers] is suckled on loot, fed on theft, swaddled in plunder, and weaned on robbery.

    The horses in the archbishop's stables the murderers appropriated as their own fee,—or, as we should now say, as loot.

  2. 2

    Synonym of sack, the plundering of a city, particularly during war.

    He consented to the loot of the city by the men under his command.

  3. 3

    Any valuable thing received for free, especially Christmas presents.

    Free Loot for Children

  4. 4

    slangSynonym of money.

    I got my mink the hard way. I paid for it. It cost a lot of loot and it took a little while to do it, but it's all mine.

    There was nothing to do except for Mom to go back slaving away as somebody's maid. In Baltimore she couldn't make half the loot she could up North.

    How about all of those guys, dolls, dancers, fancy orchestration, and special lyrics? Didn't all of that cost a lot of loot? A good question. Would you believe me if I told you that we bought all of that talent for less than $10,000?

    Movies and TV were […] continuing to pretend for many years that the contents of a single briefcase could purchase a small country. Lately, though, filmmakers have made some sincere efforts to be realistic about the sheer bulk of pilfered loot)

Etymology

Borrowed from Hindi लूट (lūṭ, “booty”), either from Sanskrit लोप्त्र (loptra, “booty, stolen property”) or लुण्ट् (luṇṭ, “to rob, plunder”). The figurative meaning developed in American English in the 1920s, resulting in a generalized meaning by the 1950s.

verb

  1. 1

    Synonym of plunder, to seize by violence, particularly during the capture of a city during war or (video games) after successful combat.

    We looted the temple and the orphanage, which turned most of the NPCs against us.

    Gunganarian, the leader of the Chooars, continues his system of looting and murder

    The plunderers are beaten whenever they are caught, but there is a good deal of burning and ‘looting’ as they call it.

    On the 22nd ultimo the Boers made a raid into the District, and the result was that some 300 head of cattle and 600 sheep were looted.

  2. 2

    Synonym of plunder, to seize by violence, particularly during the capture of a city during war or (video games) after successful combat. To rifle through a dead body and the deceased's belongings, taking anything worth stealing.

    It's shameful to loot the bodies of the people who died today.

  3. 3

    Synonym of rob, to steal something from someone by violence or threat of violence.

    He told me... that if I gave him less than to the master of the luggage-boat, he would... declare at Shēr-Gurry that I had ‘looted him!’

noun

  1. 1

    A scoop used to remove scum from brine pans in saltworks.

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle Dutch loet or loete (“scoop, shovel, scraper”), from reconstructed Old Dutch *lōta, from Old Frankish *lōtija (“scoop”), from Proto-Germanic *hlōþþijō (“scoop”), from Proto-Indo-European *kleh₂- (“to lay down, deposit, overlay”). Related to lade and ladle, and cognate with Dutch loet, Scots lute or luyt (“scoop”), West Frisian loete or lete, Middle Low German lōte (“rake”), and French louche (“ladle”).

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of lieutenantdatedClipping of lieutenant.

    R-run over an' wake up th' loot at th' station.

Etymology

Clipping.

Forms

plural
loots
past tense
looted
past participle
looted
present participle
looting
third person singular
loots
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).