eavesdrop

Meanings

1. 1
   verb

   to listen secretly to a private conversation without the speakers' knowledge

   She paused outside the office, tempted to eavesdrop on the meeting.

2. 2
   verb

   to detect another organism's signals and use the information for one's own advantage

   Some bats eavesdrop on the calls of other species to locate prey.

A seventeenth-century back-formation from eavesdropper, originally someone who stood beneath a house's eaves to listen at a window. The obsolete noun eavesdrop meant the water, or the ground, beneath the place where rain dripped from the eaves.

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