snag – English noun declension

English noun forms of snag

Noun: snag
Singularsnag
Pluralsnags

Sample Sentences

  • The coat of arms / Now on a naked snag in triumph borne. [1697, Virgil, “The Ninth Book of the Æneis”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC:]
  • ‘A’most used-up I am, I do declare!’ she observed. ‘The jolting in the cars is pretty nigh as bad as if the rail was full of snags and sawyers.’ [1842 December – 1844 July, Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1844, →OCLC:]
  • […]I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims;[…] [1899 (please specify the page), Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part:]
  • To ſee our Women's Teeth look white. / And ev'ry ſaucy ill-bred Fellow / Sneers at a Mouth profoundly yellow. / In China none hold Women ſweet, / Except their Snags are black as jett. [1718, Mat[thew] Prior, “Alma: Or, The Progress of the Mind”, in Poems on Several Occasions, London: […] Jacob Tonson […], and John Barber […], →OCLC, canto II, page 354:]
  • we hit a snag
  • The snag in this business of falling in love, aged relative, is that the parties of the first part so often get mixed up with the wrong parties of the second part, robbed of their cooler judgment by the parties of the second part's glamour. [1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, chapter XII, in Jeeves in the Offing, London: Herbert Jenkins, →OCLC:]
  • Scarcity of outstanding content viewed as snag for unproved and highly priced Vision Pro device[.] [2024 July 13, Tim Bradshaw, Michael Acton, “Apple’s headset faces struggle to gain attention of developers and end users”, in FT Weekend, London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 12:]

Etymology

1. From earlier snag (“stump or branch of a tree”), from Middle English *snagge, *snage, from Old Norse snagi (“clothes peg”) (compare Old Norse snag-hyrndr (“snag-horned, having jagged corners”)), perhaps related to *sneganą, *snakaną (“to crawl, creep, wind about”) if the original meaning of the root *sneg- was more like “pointy object, stinging creature”. Note also *snakkōną (“to snap at, smack the lips; to blow”) (German schnacken (“to chat”)) and English sneck, snatch.
2. Compare Norwegian snag, snage (“protrusion; projecting point”), Icelandic snagi (“peg”). Also see the Dutch-origin fish names snoek and snook. See: Middle English Nouns '*snagge', Old Norse Nouns 'snagi', Old Norse Nouns 'snag-hyrndr', Icelandic Nouns 'snagi'.