Rapine

The English word rape retains the Latin meaning in literary language, but the meaning is obscured by the more current meaning of “sexual violation”. The word is akin to rapine, rapture, raptor, rapacious and ravish, and referred to the more general violations, such as looting, destruction, and capture of citizens, that are inflicted upon a town or country during war, e.g. the Rape of Nanking. 

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the definition “the act of carrying away a person, especially a woman, by force” besides the more general “the act of taking anything by force” (marked as obsolete) and the more specific “violation or ravishing of a woman”.

English rape was in use since the 14th century in the general sense of “seize prey, take by force”, from raper, an Old French legal term for “to seize”, in turn from Latin rapere “seize, carry off by force, abduct”. The Latin term was also used for sexual violation, but not always. 

It is contested that the legendary event known as “The Rape of the Sabine Women”, while ultimately motivated sexually, did not entail sexual violation of the Sabine women on the spot, who were instead abducted, and then implored by the Romans to marry them (as opposed to striking a deal with their fathers or brothers first, as would have been required by law).

Though the sexual connotation is today dominant, the word “rape” can be used in a non-sexual context in literary English. In Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, the title means “the theft of a lock [of hair]”, exaggerating a trivial violation against a person. 

In the twentieth century, the classically trained J. R. R. Tolkien used the word with its old meaning of “seizing and taking away” in his The Silmarillion. The musical comedy The Fantasticks has a controversial song (“It Depends on What You Pay”) about “an old-fashioned rape”. Compare also the adjective “rapacious” which retains the generic meaning of greedy and grasping.

In Roman Catholic canon law, raptio refers to the legal prohibition of matrimony if the bride was abducted forcibly (Canon 1089 CIC).