levant

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• intransitive verb To leave hurriedly or in secret to avoid unpaid debts.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A bet made by one who expects to evade paying if he loses.
• noun [capitalized] The region east of Italy lying on and near the Mediterranean, sometimes reckoned as extending east to the Euphrates and as taking in the Nile valley, thus including Greece and Egypt; more specifically, the coast-region and islands of Asia Minor and Syria: a name originally given by the Italians.
• noun An easterly wind blowing up the Mediterranean; a levanter.
• noun Same as levant morocco.
• Of or pertaining to or obtained from the Levant.
• To run away; decamp.
• Used only in the imperative, in the exclamatory phrase levant me, a mild imprecation much like blow me!
• Rising. Minsheu, 1617;
• Eastern; coming from the direction in which the sun rises.
• [capitalized] In geology, appellative of the fourth of Professor H. Rogers's fifteen divisions of the Paleozoic strata in the Appalachian chain, the names of which suggest metaphorically the different natural periods of the day.
• noun Same as lavant.
• noun In leather manufacturing, artificial blood used instead of real blood for obtaining a perfect black.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• adjective (Law) Rising or having risen from rest; -- said of cattle. See Couchant and levant, under couchant.
• noun The countries washed by the eastern part of the Mediterranean and its contiguous waters.
• noun A levanter (the wind so called).
• adjective obsolete Eastern.
• intransitive verb Colloq. Eng. To run away from one's debts; to decamp.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun Disappearing or absconding after losing a bet.
• verb To abscond or run away, especially to avoid paying money or debts.
• adjective heraldry Rising, of an animal.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• verb run off without paying a debt
• noun a heavy morocco often used in bookbinding
• noun the former name for the geographical area of the eastern Mediterranean that is now occupied by Lebanon, Syria, and Israel