/ˈkɪd.næp/
[verb] To take someone away by force and keep them as a prisoner, often to demand money or something else in return for their release.
'Kidnap' was born in the criminal slang of 17th-century London, where 'napping a kid' meant stealing a child to sell as cheap labour in the American colonies.
The word 'kidnap' is a surprisingly modern invention, assembled from two very ordinary English words — 'kid' and 'nap' — in the criminal underworld of 17th-century London. At the time, 'kid' was slang for a young child, a word that had been circulating in everyday English since at least the 13th century, itself derived from Old Norse 'kið', meaning a young goat, and extended by metaphor to mean a young person. The second part, 'nap', was thieves' cant for 'to steal' or 'to snatch', a term widely used in the rough street language of the period. Together, the compound 'kidnap' described something very specific and very ugly: the act of stealing children.
The practice the word described was alarmingly common in the 1670s and 1680s. Agents working for plantation owners in the American colonies — particularly in Virginia and Maryland — would roam the poorer districts of English cities looking for children and young people who could be lured, tricked, or simply grabbed and shipped across the Atlantic as indentured labourers. These victims were worth money, and a thriving underground trade grew around them. The word 'kidnapper' appears in print by around 1673, and 'kidnap' as a verb follows shortly after, suggesting the crime was well-known enough to need its own name.
What is striking about 'kidnap' is how thoroughly English it is. While so many English words arrived via Latin, French, or Greek, 'kidnap' was built right here, on English soil, from English slang — a street-level coinage born of a street-level crime. The Old Norse root of 'kid' is worth pausing on: Old Norse 'kið' → Middle English 'kide' (young goat) → extended colloquial English 'kid' (child). That small journey from goat to child tells its own story about how language absorbs metaphor naturally over time, without anyone planning it.
For most of its early life, 'kidnap' referred specifically to the abduction of children or young people, and particularly to the trade in human bodies for colonial labour. But over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, its meaning expanded. As the transatlantic slave trade and indentured servitude became subjects of public debate, the word began to be used more broadly for any unlawful seizure and detention of a person, regardless of age. By the Victorian era, 'kidnapping' applied equally to the abduction of adults, and the original emphasis on youth had quietly faded.
Today 'kidnap' is fully standard in legal and everyday language across the English-speaking world, though legal systems often prefer 'abduction' or 'unlawful detention' in formal documents. Interestingly, American English tends to use 'kidnap' while British English frequently opts for 'abduct', though both are understood everywhere. The word has also spawned the noun 'kidnapping', the agent noun 'kidnapper', and is sometimes shortened informally to 'nap' in certain dialects — a small echo of the original thieves' slang that brought the whole word into existence three and a half centuries ago.