plagiarism

This term carries a heavy negative connotation of dishonesty and intellectual theft. It is primarily used in academic, journalistic, and artistic contexts where original authorship is the primary currency of value. The act is viewed as a violation of professional ethics and academic integrity. As an uncountable noun, it refers to the general practice or the specific instance of theft. Because it is uncountable, it does not have a plural form and cannot be counted with numbers; instead, one must use partitive phrases such as a case of plagiarism or an instance of plagiarism to refer to individual occurrences.