I just heard some radio hosts questioning whether "scoundrel" and "abscond" are related. I rather doubted it, considering their spelling. Then I looked them up, and now I am not so sure. While "abscond" comes from the Latin "ab," meaning "away" and "condere," meaning "to put," the etymology of "scoundrel" in Dictionary.com was listed as "unknown." I doubt that they are related, and yet they are both villains. Any thoughts?

It's probably just coincidence: no reason to think otherwise.

But a not unreasonable story can be made to relate them. As scoundrel is Early Modern (attested 1589) it could have been formed by aphesis from a word *abscondrel 'runaway, fugitive'. But as neither that not *scondrel is attested, I don't believe it. (Or someone with OED could check to make sure they're not in it.)

Latin cond- meant various kinds of things we could sum up as 'put up': such as found, establish, compose, build, preserve, store, imprison, sheathe, conceal.

With the ab-/abs- prefix it's specifically 'conceal', and this is what it came into English meaning. The transitive sense dropped out and we're left with intransitive 'conceal oneself', with absconder 'fugitive from justice'. My old SOED doesn't mention any specific sense of 'abscond with money', which is probably its usual use now.

My old SOED doesn't mention any specific sense of 'abscond with money', which is probably its usual use now.

Funny, because that is the use I am used to, as well. Yet, when I looked it up in dictionary.com, most of the definitions related to "depart secretly" or to "hide oneself." There was only 1 of 6 that said, "run away, usually includes taking something or somebody along." So, at least that source seems to indicate that the most common use is to hide oneself.