Robbere

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A person who takes property from others unlawfully, often through threats, violence, or stealth
2. Someone who seizes goods belonging to another by force or secret theft
3. An individual who plunders or pilfers what belongs to someone else without permission

Etymology: Rob and robe are close relatives, and the surprise is that the garment word started out meaning loot. Both come from a Germanic root, the Frankish "rauba," meaning booty or spoils, which passed into Old French as "rober" (to plunder) and "robe" (a garment, or spoils that included clothing). The noun "robe" kept the older sense of stolen goods for a while before settling on the garment we know today. This word is the agent form of the verb "rob," made by adding the suffix "-er" to name the person who does the robbing. Middle English borrowed the verb from Anglo-French "rober" in the 1200s, and the noun for the thief followed in the 1300s, with spellings like "robbere" appearing in the period's manuscripts. Its ancestry runs through the same plundering vocabulary that gave us the garment, so the thief and the stolen clothes share a family tree.