confiscate

verb

1. (transitive)To use one's authority to lay claim to and separate a possession from its holder.

   “In schools, it is common for teachers to confiscate electronic games and other distractions.”

   “We doe confiscate (Towards the satisfying of your accounts) All that you haue.”

   “1768, Alexander Dow (translator), The History of Hindostan by Muḥammad Qāsim Hindū Shāh Astarābādī, London: T. Becket & P.A. de Hondt, Volume 2, Section 4, p. 63, The Persian having evacuated the imperial provinces, the vizier became more cruel and oppressive than ever: he extorted money from the poor by tortures, and confiscated the estates of the nobility, upon false or very frivolous pretences.”

   “Why, your cavalier is a rebel—an exile, whose property is confiscated, and for whose neck the gibbet stands prepared!”

   “Whenever you strike a frontier—that’s the border of a country, you know—you find a custom-house there, and the gov’ment officers comes and rummages among your things and charges a big tax, which they call a duty because it’s their duty to bust you if they can, and if you don’t pay the duty they’ll hog your sand. They call it confiscating, but that don’t deceive nobody, it’s just hogging, and that’s all it is.”

adj

1. (not-comparable, obsolete)Confiscated; seized and appropriated by the government for public use; forfeit.

   “Therefore give out you are of Epidamnum, / Lest that your goods too soon be confiscate.”

   “[…] thy lands and goods / Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate / Unto the state of Venice.”

   “[N]ot to lay into the Exchequer, or Common Treasury, such goods as are confiscate, but to store them up as holy and consecrate things, which except it bee practised, confiscations, and fines of the Common people would bee frequent, and so this State would decay by weakening the people.”

   “Thy goods are confiscate unto the state, / Thy name is razed from out her records, […]”