once a thief, always a thief in English

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        "A person found to have stolen another's property will always be marked as a thief."
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        "Said in admonishment to a person who was once considered a thief and later professed to have reformed, only to have been caught stealing once again."
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  "word": "once a thief, always a thief"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-05-19 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-05-01 using wiktextract (c3cc510 and 1d3fdbf). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.

"once a thief, always a thief" meaning in English

Phrase

Proverb