1665 R. Head Eng. Rogue I. v. 52 Shop-lift, One that steals out of shops.

1673 R. Head Canting Acad. 191 The tenth is a Shoplift that carries a Bob, When he ranges the City the Shops for to rob.

1692 Scarronides ii. 1 How Grecian Shop-lifts..Brake open honest Trojans doors.

1731 Effectual Scheme Preventing Street Robberies 43 Some entertain House-breakers, others Street-Robbers..some merely Shop-lifts and Pick-pockets.

1767 T. Bridges Homer Travestie (ed. 2) II. xi. 175 Thus shoplifts see their brothers taken.

1839 New Eng. Rev. 3 Mar. ‘Ve must be sometimes took in by the vorld,’ as the shop-lift observed to the turn-key.

1913 Mod. Philol. 11 240 Tradesmen, servants, and shop lifts use mythological terms as freely as the lawyer and the students.

2005 T. C. Whitlock Crime, Gender & Consumer Culture in 19th-cent. Eng. v. 132 Under Romilly's bill a shoplift who took over five pounds worth of goods could still be transported.

1585 in H. Ellis Orig. Lett. Eng. Hist. (1824) 1st Ser. II. 303 Note that ffoyste is to cutt a pockett, nyppe is to cutt a purse, lyft is to robbe a shoppe.]

1756 Public Advertiser 22 July The Lawn is supposed to be Shoplifted out of some Linnen-Draper's Shop.

1864 W. G. Wills Wife's Evid. vii. 40/2 It is no affair of ours that the Marchioness of B— was in the police dock for shoplifting a yard of ribbon.

1922 J. Joyce Ulysses iii. xviii. 707 A whore always shoplifting anything she could.

1979 K. Conlon Move in Game i. iii. 39 She'd shoplifted a bottle of nail varnish remover.

2010 Daily Tel. (Nexis) 3 Sept. 20 He sounds much like a bank robber who confesses to shoplifting sweets.

a1822 P. B. Shelley Homer's Hymn to Mercury xlix, in Posthumous Poems (1824) 311 This among the gods shall be your gift, To be considered as the lord of those Who swindle, house-break, sheep-steal, and shop-lift.

1859 L. Oliphant Narr. Earl of Elgin's Mission China & Japan I. ix. 169 A lawless rabble, following close in rear, took advantage of the confusion created to shoplift with a dexterity worthy of the swell-mob.

1959 Times 9 Mar. (Britain's Food Suppl.) p. ix/3 The temptation to shop-lift is one facet of the principle on which every self-service store depends.

2012 Daily Tel. 14 Nov. 32/4 ‘The whole world looks to London,’ he says proudly, ‘and then sends its slack-jawed teenagers to chain-smoke and shoplift in the Trocadero’.