Defalcation
noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 The act of cancelling part of a claim by deducting a smaller claim which the claimant owes to the defendant. countable, uncountable
- 2 the fraudulent appropriation of funds or property entrusted to your care but actually owned by someone else wordnet
- 3 Embezzlement. countable, uncountable
"Granting that Mr. Ireland had gone into his office at ten minutes to ten o'clock at night for the purpose of extracting £5000 worth of notes and gold from the bank safe, whilst giving the theft the appearance of a night burglary; […] why should he, at nine o'clock the following morning, fall in a dead faint and get cerebral congestion at sight of a defalcation he knew had occurred?"
- 4 the sum of money that is misappropriated wordnet
Example
More examples"Granting that Mr. Ireland had gone into his office at ten minutes to ten o'clock at night for the purpose of extracting £5000 worth of notes and gold from the bank safe, whilst giving the theft the appearance of a night burglary; […] why should he, at nine o'clock the following morning, fall in a dead faint and get cerebral congestion at sight of a defalcation he knew had occurred?"
Etymology
Late 15th century, from Medieval Latin dēfalcātiōnem, accusative singular of dēfalcātiō (literally “cutting off, lopping off with a sickle”), nominalization of dēfalcō, from Latin dē (“off”) + falx (“sickle, scythe, pruning hook”), from which also English falcate (“sickle-shaped”). By surface analysis, defalcate + -ion (“the act of”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.