Vagyst

Vagyst is a term occasionally encountered in Baltic language contexts that denotes the act of theft or the act of stealing. In contemporary standard usage, the Lithuanian noun for theft is vagystė, and vagyst is typically described as an archaic, dialectal, or stem form rather than a living everyday form in modern speech.

Etymology and usage context

Vagyst is related to the same root that gives rise to the standard word vagystė in Lithuanian. As a form without the final suffix, it appears mainly in historical texts, dictionaries as a stem, or in dialectal spellings. In these contexts, vagyst serves as a linguistic precursor to the modern term, illustrating how the word evolved to its current nominal form.

Legal context

In modern legal language, theft is defined and prosecuted through the term vagystė in Lithuanian law. Vagyst, when referenced, would be understood as an older or more general root concept rather than the formal legal designation. For this reason, official statutes and contemporary court materials favor vagystė and related derivatives over vagyst.

See also

Vagystė, theft, theft in Lithuanian law. Other Baltic terms for theft appear in neighboring languages, such as zādzība in Latvian, which are not direct cognates of vagyst.