kidnapped

The verb 'kidnap' appears in English by 1673, compounded from two slang terms: 'kid' (a child, from Old Norse 'kið,' meaning young goat, adopted into English slang by the 1590s) and 'nap' or 'nab,' both meaning to steal or seize quickly. The compound was formed in the underworld cant of London, where specialized vocabularies for crime had long flourished. The earliest documented use occurs in a 1682 pamphlet describing the practice of stealing English children and young men to sell as indentured laborers in the American colonies and Caribbean plantations. The perpetrators were called 'kidnappers' before the verb 'kidnap' settled into standard form.

The trade was real and documented. Merchants in London, Bristol, and Liverpool paid agents to recruit, by deception or force, workers for colonial tobacco and sugar operations. The victims were often teenagers from London's streets, transported to Virginia, Barbados, and Jamaica without their consent. Parliamentary records from 1670 mention the problem explicitly, and a 1671 act attempted, with limited success, to curb the practice by requiring consent documents.

The past tense 'kidnapped' first appeared as a past participial adjective, describing those who had been seized. The word moved steadily up the register from criminal slang to newspaper usage through the 18th century. Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel 'Kidnapped' gave the word its most famous literary setting, dramatizing the abduction of young David Balfour in post-Jacobite Scotland. Stevenson's title, chosen for its visceral plainness, fixed the past tense form as an independent noun and concept in English literary consciousness.

The word's journey from criminal slang to legal term took less than a century. By the 18th century, 'kidnap' and 'kidnapping' appeared in legal statutes on both sides of the Atlantic. American law gave 'kidnapping' federal weight after the 1932 Lindbergh baby abduction, when Congress passed the Lindbergh Law making interstate kidnapping a federal crime. The slang of slavers had become the language of courts.