Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act or behavior of plagiarizing.
  • noun An instance of plagiarizing, especially a passage that is taken from the work of one person and reproduced in the work of another without attribution.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The purloining or wrongful appropriation of another's ideas, writings, artistic designs, etc., and giving these forth as one's own; specifically, the offense of taking passages from another's compositions, and publishing them, either word for word or in substance, as one's own; literary theft.
  • noun A passage or thought thus stolen.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act or practice of plagiarizing.
  • noun That which is plagiarized; a work which has been plagiarized.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun uncountable The act of plagiarizing: the copying of another person's ideas, text, or other creative work, and presenting it as one's own, especially without permission.
  • noun uncountable Text or other work resulting from this act.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the act of plagiarizing; taking someone's words or ideas as if they were your own
  • noun a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From plagiary.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From plagiary +‎ -ism.

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Examples

  • UPDATE: Here's a longer piece by Anderson who does not use the term plagiarism, including a detailed list of passages displaying unacknowledged overlap and repetition.

    Archive 2005-10-01 Jenny Davidson 2005

  • UPDATE: Here's a longer piece by Anderson who does not use the term plagiarism, including a detailed list of passages displaying unacknowledged overlap and repetition.

    There's an odd Jenny Davidson 2005

  • But the potential for accusations of plagiarism is only one of the reasons I've made a rule of not reading unpublished mss.

    "The needle sticks and the penny drops." greygirlbeast 2010

  • In academia and the business world, they'd call it plagiarism or intellectual property theft.

    Archive 2009-10-04 Tyler 2009

  • Translation of the Statement of B. Strugatsky about the fake accusation of Cameron in plagiarism, or similarities between Avatar and the Noon

    SF Tidbits for 3/19/10 2010

  • But the potential for accusations of plagiarism is only one of the reasons I've made a rule of not reading unpublished mss.

    "The needle sticks and the penny drops." greygirlbeast 2010

  • "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, surely you can see that the charge that my client has committed plagiarism is less parsimonious than her claim that she was divinely inspired?"

    An Amazing First Century 2009

  • The New York Times has been a tad lax in their strict enforcement of the rules of editorial integrity -- which probably explains why William Kristol was allowed to work the term of his contract -- but blatant word-for-word plagiarism is different than getting your facts wrong or filing under a dateline that would appear to put you in the story when you're not.

    More Than Just Cut and Paste 2009

  • He also says plagiarism is actually a form of identity theft, because the ideas of an author are his identity.

    The Volokh Conspiracy » The Battle for the Internet: 2010

  • Translation of the Statement of B. Strugatsky about the fake accusation of Cameron in plagiarism, or similarities between Avatar and the Noon

    March 2010 2010

  • More commonly, iThenticate pointed to passages, often several paragraphs long, in which some words and phrases matched existing texts whereas others were reworded—so-called “mosaic plagiarism.”

    Embattled Harvard honesty professor accused of plagiarism

Comments

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  • Dorothy Parker called this "the only 'ism' that Hollywood believes in."

    October 7, 2008