Scrumps

Part of speech: verb, noun

Definitions

1. An informal term referring to small, often stolen fruits from someone else's garden ; a colloquial expression for illicitly picking fruits without permission ; an informal label for gathering fruits surreptitiously or unauthorized
2. A casual word used to describe the act of taking fruits stealthily from another's property ; a folk term for pilfering produce such as apples or berries from gardens ; a vernacular expression for fruit obtained by trespass or petty theft
3. A regional or slang word denoting the secretive collection of fruits from someone else's trees or bushes ; an informal term for the minor theft of garden fruit ; a colloquial way to describe the unauthorized harvesting of fruit from private land

Etymology: Scrump started life as a regional variant of "scrimp", meaning to shrink or shrivel. The root sits deep in Germanic: Proto-Germanic "skrimbanan" meant "to shrink", and the same idea survives in Old English "scrimman", which meant to draw up or contract. Dutch or Low German speakers likely contributed "schrimpen", "to shrivel up", which English dialects adopted and bent into "scrump". The sense that matters here came from those shrivelled or shrunken fruits. In English dialect, "scrumps" were the small, withered apples left hanging on the tree or lying in the grass after the good fruit had been taken, the leftovers no one wanted. Picking them up quietly, often from an orchard that was not your own, turned into the act itself, so the word shifted from describing the fruit to describing the theft. The word is also a cousin of "shrimp", which shares the same shrinking root and points to the same sense of something small and diminished.

Synonyms: steals, pilfers, snatches, burglarizes, pilfers

Antonyms: returns, gives, offers