How to Use purloin in a Sentence

purloin

verb
  • Stealthily, from its roost on the ceiling, one bat reached out and purloined his sun hat.
    — Natasha Frost, New York Times, 4 Apr. 2023
  • Almost all of it was hearsay, rather than purloined documents.
    — Stephen Kotkin, Foreign Affairs, 19 Sep. 2017
  • What the man purloined wasn’t just a pair of shoes but something like an emblem of identity.
    — Amy X. Wang, New York Times, 26 Sep. 2023
  • Nearby is the kitchen that Pelosi and her fellow students used to sneak into at night to purloin ice cream.
    — Jason Bell; Fashion Editor: Miguel Enamorado, Harper's BAZAAR, 23 Sep. 2019
  • For years visitors have purloined pieces of Uluru as souvenirs.
    — National Geographic, 15 Sep. 2019
  • In other works, Parker has purloined objects, squashed them, melted them down and recast them, scratched them, and fired bullets at them.
    — Andrew Dickson, The New Yorker, 7 June 2017
  • Your duty to intervene increases with the value of the object and the likelihood it will be purloined.
    — Judith Martin, Mercury News, 29 Oct. 2025
  • Ronald Reagan insisted his glossy locks were naturally brown and claimed that reporters had purloined clippings from his barber's floor to prove him wrong.
    — Author: Roxanne Roberts, Anchorage Daily News, 10 Nov. 2019
  • Ronald Reagan insisted his glossy locks were naturally brown and claimed that reporters had purloined clippings from his barber’s floor to prove him wrong.
    — Washington Post, 6 Nov. 2019
  • Investigators say the hackers also purloined more than a million detailed call records from telecom companies.
    — Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, New York Times, 7 Mar. 2023
  • The peasants who lived nearby, curious what valuable plants the king was guarding in his garden, swept in by dark after the guard’s departure and purloined the potato plants for their own plots.
    — Bill St. John, The Denver Post, 9 Oct. 2019
  • The rightful inheritance that Purlie means to purloin by madcap deception is another promissory note whose power drives the action of the play.
    — Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 30 Sep. 2023
  • Our plan to purloin dogecoin to purchase purifiers pursuant to our planetary progression terminates.
    — Aaron Pressman, Fortune, 7 May 2021
  • People used to laugh at my suggestion that computer viruses were being planted and user info was being purloined by the same companies who sell us security software.
    — Jonathan Takiff, Philly.com, 18 Oct. 2017
  • Nonetheless, the Shadow Brokers had purloined the capability to penetrate top-secret servers around the world.
    — Tim Weiner, The New Republic, 27 Mar. 2023
  • Everyone knows that data like credit cards and even Social Security numbers are routinely purloined.
    — Steven Levy, WIRED, 12 Jan. 2024
  • Its most alarming prop is a coffee cup, accidentally purloined, and what passes for a mastermind is a housing bureaucracy that’s evil only in its inefficiency.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 2 Mar. 2023
  • Cheap, second-hand, and purloined weapons comprised Hamas’ deadly makeshift arsenal that fueled a devastating, multi-pronged attack on Israel over the weekend.
    — Isabelle Chapman, CNN, 13 Oct. 2023
  • Federal prosecutors now say China used the program to purloin sensitive technology.
    — Penn Bullock, New York Times, 6 Feb. 2020
  • Even John Lahr, the New Yorker theater critic who co-wrote her triumphant one-woman show, ended up suing her for allegedly purloining profits by using bits from the show in her cabaret act.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 18 Oct. 2019
  • Police say further investigation revealed the individuals had purloined the paper products — which are a scarce commodity amid the coronavirus pandemic — and the linens from a maid’s cart at a nearby hotel.
    — Los Angeles Times, 16 Apr. 2020
  • The attacks on Friday are likely to raise significant questions about whether the growing number of countries developing and stockpiling cyberweapons can avoid having those same tools purloined and turned against their own citizens.
    — Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger, New York Times, 12 May 2017
  • By happenstance or not, in the days and weeks after the meeting with the Russian lawyer, emails purloined from Democratic computers were made public, which investigators tied to Russian hacking.
    — Peter Baker, Alaska Dispatch News, 13 July 2017
  • Digital technology has allowed such leakers as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning to purloin much vaster reams of data with significantly greater ease.
    — Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, 6 June 2022
  • Enlisting one of the diner's regular customers, Benny (Azim Rizk), a mechanic who has the hots for her, as an accomplice, Priscilla manages to get away with purloining the loot.
    — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter, 9 Mar. 2018
  • The world press was less restrained; the Post, the Daily Mail, the Hindustan Times, and many others ran screaming headlines, accompanied by photographs of the climbers purloined from social media.
    — William Finnegan, New Yorker, 29 June 2026
  • The film actually purloins its main talents from the 1983 documentary Breakin’ ’n’ Enterin’ from director Topper Carew.
    — Nicholas Bell, SPIN, 19 Dec. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'purloin.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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