Webster’s:
Plagiarism: an act or instance of plagiarizing; something plagiarized.
Plagiarize: to steal and pass off as one’s own the ideas or words of another; to present as one’s own an idea or product derived from an existing source.
Plagiarize: to steal and pass off as one’s own the ideas or words of another; to present as one’s own an idea or product derived from an existing source.
Thrall, Hibbard, and Holman, A Handbook to Literature:
Literary theft. A writer who steals the PLOT of some obscure, forgotten story and uses it as new in a story of his own is a p]~giarist. Plagiarism is more noticeable when it involves a stealing of language than when substance only is borrowed. From flagrant exhibitions of stealing both thought and language plagiarism shades off into less serious things such as unconscious borrowings, borrowing of minor elements, and mere IMITATION. In fact, the critical doctrine of IMITATION, as understood in Renaissance times, often led to what would nowadays be called plagiarism. Thus, Spenser’s free borrowings from other romantic EPICS in composing his Faerie Queene were by him regarded as virtues, since he was ‘following’ a predecessor in the same type of writing. A modern dramatist could not with impunity borrow PLOTS from other DRAMAS and from old stories in the way in which Shakespeare did. With plagiarism compare LITERARY FORGERIES, its converse, where an author pretends that another has written what he has actually written himself. See GHOST-WRITER.
Lichtman, A. J., and V. French. Historians and the Living Past:
Some teachers tell their classes a story to illustrate the problem of plagiarism. An unmarried, intelligent, and educated woman lived in a society in which job opportunities for women were extremely limited. She wrote a fine book about an important historical question. But, because she was a woman and because she was relatively unknown, only a few copies of her work were sold. Much to her dismay two years later, she read a book by another prominent and male historian dealing with the same question she had treated in her book. She was not upset at finding another book on the topic, for she relished scholarly discussion and debate. What did cause her grief was finding in the other writer’s book the same argument she had presented in her study without a single reference to her book. She felt robbed and could not endure to let the intellectual thievery go by unnoticed. She sent the offending author a terse and tart letter. ‘Dear Sir’, she wrote, ‘If you will prevent me from making my living with my ideas, I fear I shall be forced to earn it with my body.’ (p. 242).