steal the show

verb

"steal-the-show" is a 12-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.

The verdict

“steal the show” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.

Unranked
below top-frequency English
14
letters

According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To be the best performer during a performance.

Corpus desk

Index EN-steal-the-show · steal the show · English

steal the show · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables

  • FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
  • LEN-MEGA 14 letters
  • VOW-4 4 vowels
  • CONFUS-0 No pairs
  • VAR-0 0 variants
  • BOOK-THIN "S" thin
  • PHOTO-UNK Peer pending

Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern

Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.

Key facts for steal the show
PropertyValue
Headwordsteal the show
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechVerb
Letters14
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Long-tail rank of “steal the show” in English

steal the showranks outside the top 100,000 English headwords, in the long tail of specialist, archaic, or seldom-used vocabulary, exactly the territory where a reader stops mid-sentence to double-check spelling.

Beyond rank #100,000. Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list.

Rare enough to double-check

steal the show is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "To be the best performer during a performance.".

steal the show has no tracked misspelling variants, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.

This entry's etymology isn't recorded, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is steal the show, spelled S-T-E-A-L- -T-H-E- -S-H-O-W.

Definition

  1. 1
    To be the best performer during a performance.

Recorded use

Wiktionary example

These source excerpts show how steal the show appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.

  1. And it was Lampard who stole the show with a vintage performance to silence some of his recent critics.

Synonyms

steal the scene

This word in other languages

Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "steal the show"?
"steal the show" is spelled S-T-E-A-L- -T-H-E- -S-H-O-W.
What does "steal the show" mean?
As a verb, "steal the show" means: To be the best performer during a performance.
What language does "steal the show" come from?
"steal the show" is a English word. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data for this and other words across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German on PlainSpell.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list