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snapdragon [snapdragon 词源字典]: snapdragon: [16] The herbalist John Gerard (no feminist, evidently) gave the reason why antirrhinums were called snapdragons: ‘The flowers [are] fashioned like a dragon’s mouth; from whence the women have taken the name Snapdragon’, Herbal 1597. The term was also used from the early 18th century for a party game which involved picking raisins out of a bowl of burning brandy and eating them while they were still alight – the allusion being of course to the dragon’s firebreathing habits.
[snapdragon etymology, snapdragon origin, 英语词源]
snatch: snatch: see snack
sneeze: sneeze: [15] The Old English word for ‘sneeze’ was fnēsan, a distant relative of Greek pneuma ‘breath’ (source of English pneumatic). This survived into Middle English as fnese. The letters f and s were very similar in medieval script, so it could have played a part in the late 15th-century emergence of sneeze. Fnese had largely died out by the early 15th century, and it could well be that when printing got into full swing in the 1490s, with many old manuscript texts being reissued in printed form, printers unfamiliar with the old word fnese assumed it had the much more common initial consonant cluster sn-.

Another factor in the equation is the now obsolete verb neeze ‘sneeze’. This was borrowed in the 14th century from Old Norse hnósja, a descendant of the Indo-European base *ksneu-, which also produced German niesen, Dutch niezen, Swedish nysa, Danish nyse, and Russian chikhat’ ‘sneeze’. It bridged the gap between fnese and sneeze, and the new sneeze no doubt struck people as a more expressive alternative to the old neeze. (Both fnese and neeze go back ultimately to an imitation of the sound of breathing, blowing, or sneezing.)
=> pneumatic
sniff: sniff: see snuff
snivel: snivel: see snuff
snob: snob: [18] Snob originally meant a ‘shoemaker’. Cambridge University students of the late 18th century took it over as a slang term for a ‘townsman, someone not a member of the university’, and it seems to have been this usage which formed the basis in the 1830s for the emergence of the new general sense ‘member of the lower orders’ (‘The nobs have lost their dirty seats – the honest snobs have got ’em’, proclaimed the Lincoln Herald on 22 July 1831, anticipating the new Reform Act).

This in turn developed into ‘ostentatiously vulgar person’, but it was the novelist William Thackeray who really sowed the seeds of the word’s modern meaning in his Book of Snobs 1848, where he used it for ‘someone vulgarly aping his social superiors’. It has since broadened out to include those who insist on their gentility as well as those who aspire to it. As for the origins of the word snob itself, they remain a mystery.

An ingenious suggestion once put forward is that it came from s. nob., supposedly an abbreviation for Latin sine nobilitate ‘without nobility’, but this ignores the word’s early history.
snooker: snooker: [19] The most widely canvassed theory of the origins of the term snooker is that it is an adaptation of late 19th-century army slang snooker ‘new cadet’ (‘These embryo generals were called by the somewhat sneering terms of “snookers” or “last-joined”,’ Routledge’s Every Boy’s Annual 1872). The game was invented, as a diversion perhaps from the monotony of billiards, by British army officers serving in India in the 1870s, and the story goes that the term snooker was applied to it by Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain (1856–1944), at that time a subaltern in the Devonshire Regiment stationed in Jubbulpore, in allusion to the inept play of one of his brother officers.

The ancestry of snooker ‘new cadet’, however, remains a mystery.
snore: snore: [14] Like snort [14] (which originally meant ‘snore’), snore goes back ultimately to a prehistoric Germanic base *snor-, imitative of the sound it represents. From the same source came German schnarchen ‘snore’, which produced the German dialect noun schnorchel ‘snout’. The mainstream language adopted it as a term for a ‘breathing tube’, and English borrowed it as snorkel [20].
=> snorkel, snort
snout: snout: [13] Snout and snot [14] are very close etymologically. Both go back ultimately to a prehistoric Germanic base *snut-or *snūt-, source also of obsolete English snite ‘wipe or pick one’s nose’, German schneuzen ‘blow one’s nose’, and German schnauze ‘snout’ (whence English schnauzer ‘German breed of dog’ [20]). The colloquial snoot ‘nose’ [19] is an alteration of snout, and formed the basis of the adjective snooty [20] (the underlying idea being of holding one’s ‘nose’ in the air in a superior way).
=> schnauzer, snooty, snot
snow: snow: [OE] Snow is an ancient word, with relatives throughout the Indo-European languages. Its ultimate ancestor was Indo- European *snigwh- or *snoigwho-. This also produced Latin nix (source of French neige, Italian neve, and Spanish nieve), obsolete Welsh nyf, Russian sneg, Czech snóh, Latvian sniegs, etc. Its prehistoric Germanic descendant was *snaiwaz, which has evolved into German schnee, Dutch sneeuw, Swedish snö, Danish sne, and English snow.
snuff: snuff: English has three words snuff, all probably going back ultimately to a prehistoric Germanic base *snuf-, imitative of the sound of drawing air noisily in through the nose. Snuff ‘powdered tobacco for inhaling’ [17] was borrowed from Dutch snuf. This was probably short for snuftabak, etymologically ‘sniff-tobacco’, which in turn was derived from Middle Dutch snuffen ‘sniff, snuffle’, source of English snuff ‘sniff’ [16].

That base *snuf- also produced English snuffle [16], probably borrowed from Low German or Dutch snuffelen, and snivel [14], which may go back to an unrecorded Old English *snyflan; and sniff [14], if not directly related, was certainly similarly inspired by the sound of sniffing. Snuff ‘put out a candle’ was derived in the 15th century from the noun snuff ‘burnt candlewick’ [14].

The origins of this are not known, but the fact that the now obsolete verb snot was once used for ‘put out a candle’ as well as ‘blow one’s nose’ suggests that this snuff too may ultimately have connections with the inner workings of the nose (possibly a perceived resemblance between an extinguished candlewick and a piece of nasal mucus), and with the base *snuf-. Snuff it ‘die’ is first recorded in the late 19th century.
=> snivel
so: so: [OE] So is a general Germanic word, with relatives in German so, Dutch zo, Swedish så, and Danish saa. It is also distantly connected with Greek hōs ‘as’ and hóppōs ‘how’. Far back in its history it participated in the formation of English as and such.
soak: soak: [OE] Soak and suck come from the same ultimate source, the prehistoric Germanic base *suk-. It appears to have been a fairly late Germanic formation, for its only known immediate relative is West Frisian soken or zoken ‘soak’.
=> suck
soap: soap: [OE] The word soap is of West Germanic origin. It comes from a prehistoric *saipō (source also of German seife and Dutch zeep). This may have been related to Old English sīpian ‘drip’, suggesting that it perhaps originally referred to a stage in the manufacture of soap. The Romans, like the Greeks, used oil for cleansing the skin, not soap, and so they did not have their own native word for it. Instead they borrowed the Germanic term, as sāpō, which has evolved into French savon, Italian sapone, and Spanish jabon. Germanic *saipō was also acquired by Latvian (ziepes), Finnish (saippio), and Lappish (saipo).
soap opera: soap opera: [20] The original soap operas were a radio phenomenon, in 1930s America. Serial dramas dealing with humdrum-butoccasionally- melodramatic domestic life were as common then as they are on television now, and several of those on the commercial US networks were sponsored by soap manufacturers. A writer on the Christian Century in 1938 said ‘These fifteen-minute tragedies…I call the “soap tragedies”…because it is by the grace of soap I am allowed to shed tears for these characters who suffer so much from life’.

The soap connection soon linked up with horse opera, a mildly derisive term for a Western movie that had been around since the 1920s, to produce soap opera (a later coinage on the same model was space opera). The abbreviated version soap is recorded as early as 1943.
sober: sober: [13] Sober comes via Old French sobre from Latin sōbrius ‘not drunk’. This was the opposite of ēbrius ‘drunk’ (source of French ivre ‘drunk’ and English inebriate [15]), but where ēbrius came from, and precisely what connection the presumably related sōbrius has with it, are not known.
=> inebriate
soccer: soccer: [19] Soccer was coined from Association football, a term introduced around 1870 for football played according to the rules of the Football Association (as opposed to Rugby football). The suffix -er was commonly used as a more-or-less meaningless addition to nouns in British public-school and university slang of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (footer ‘football’ was formed in the same way). Originally, in the 1890s, socker vied with soccer as the word’s spelling.
social: social: [16] Latin socius meant ‘companion, partner’. It came ultimately from the Indo- European base *seq- ‘follow’ (source of English sequel, sequence, etc). From it was derived the adjective sociālis, which has given English social (socialism was coined in the early 19th century). Other Latin derivatives have given English associate, sociable [16] and society [16]. Sociology [19] was borrowed from French sociologie, a term coined in 1830 by the philosopher Auguste Comte.
=> associate, sequel, sequence, society, sue, suit
sock: sock: English has two distinct words sock. The noun ‘foot covering’ [OE] originally meant ‘light shoe’, and went back ultimately to Greek súkkhos, a word perhaps borrowed from some Asiatic language. Latin took this over as soccus, which was then borrowed into prehistoric Germanic as *sok-. And this in turn evolved into German socke, Dutch zok, Swedish socka, Danish sok, and English sock. The origins of sock ‘hit’ [17] are not known.
sod: sod: see sodomy