Plagiums

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The unauthorized copying or close imitation of another's work or ideas presented as one's own ; the act of stealing literary or creative content without credit ; instances where original material is duplicated in violation of ethical or legal standards
2. The act of taking someone else's written or artistic creations without permission and claiming them as original ; copying ideas or expressions dishonestly ; occurrences of intellectual property infringement through imitation
3. The practice of unethically appropriating another's intellectual efforts for personal gain ; the replication of text, images, or concepts without acknowledgement ; examples of fraudulent representation of ownership over creative content

Etymology: The Roman legal term "plagium" meant kidnapping, specifically the theft of a free person or of another man's slave, and it was the ancestor of the modern word for copying someone else's work. Its root is the Latin "plaga", a net, snare or trap, the image being of someone caught in a trap set by a thief. The word moved from the courtroom into literary vocabulary through Latin writers who used it figuratively. In the sense of stealing another's writing, the idea was that a poet had seized a verse or a line as if it were a captive belonging to someone else. English later borrowed the Latin word directly as "plagiary" and then formed "plagiarism" from it, and the modern meaning of stealing words or ideas grew from that metaphor. "Plagiums" is simply the plural of "plagium", so the plural form points back to the Latin noun, which is the source of all these English relatives.

Synonyms: plagiarisms, copying, piracies, imitations, infringements

Antonyms: originality, authenticity, creativity, innovation, invention