kid + nap
kidnap
English
“Kidnapping originally meant stealing children to work as servants in American colonies—the word was coined for a specific seventeenth-century crime.”
English kidnap appeared in the late 1670s as a compound of kid, slang for 'child,' and nap (or nab), slang for 'to seize or steal.' The word was created to describe a specific criminal practice: stealing children and young adults from the streets of London and shipping them to the American colonies as indentured servants or laborers. The 'kids' being 'napped' were real children, and the crime was widespread.
The practice was called 'spiriting' before kidnap was coined—from the 'spirits' or agents who lured victims with promises of opportunity in the New World. Parliament investigated spiriting in 1664 after public outcry, but the practice continued for decades. Ships departing from Bristol, Liverpool, and London carried kidnapped children alongside legitimate emigrants. The American colonies needed labor, and not all of it arrived voluntarily.
By the eighteenth century, kidnap had expanded beyond child-stealing for colonial labor to mean any forcible abduction. The specific colonial context was forgotten, but the compound word preserved it: kid-nap, child-snatch. The word carries a record of a crime that most people do not know existed—the systematic theft of English children for American farms and plantations.
Modern kidnapping law treats the crime as a felony in virtually every jurisdiction. The word has been applied to political abductions, ransom crimes, parental custody disputes, and human trafficking. The seventeenth-century slang compound became formal legal terminology. What began as London street argot for a specific colonial atrocity now names a universal crime.
Related Words
Today
The word kidnap is so familiar that its components have become invisible. Nobody hears 'kid-nap' and thinks of a child being snatched from a London street for a transatlantic voyage. The compound has fused into a single unit, and the colonial history has been sealed inside.
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." —William Faulkner. Kidnap is a word that proves Faulkner right. The seventeenth-century crime is encoded in the twenty-first-century law. Every indictment for kidnapping invokes, unknowingly, the spirited children of London.
Explore more words