Nab

How to spell nab

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce nab

What does nab mean?

1. verbTo catch, seize, or arrest someone, often suddenly or by surprise.

Nab in a sentence

• The officers managed to nab the suspect at the airport.

• Security cameras helped police nab the shoplifter.

Where does nab come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Nab is a low, colloquial word that surfaced in English around the late 1600s, when it appears in slang and cant glossaries used by thieves and the people who chased them. It is generally traced to a Scandinavian source, related to dialect words such as the Norwegian and Swedish 'nappa', meaning to snatch or grab quickly, and it is a close cousin of the older verb 'nap' in the same grabbing sense. The word carried a flavour of sudden, sly seizure from the start, which is why it slid so naturally into the language of catching criminals. By the eighteenth century it was firmly attached to the idea of an arrest, the sense of a constable laying hold of a suspect. Because it is built from a single short root, the spelling holds no real surprise: one tricky point is simply that the final consonant doubles before the past tense ending, giving 'nabbed'.

How the word is built

• nab (a single Germanic root meaning to seize or snatch; no prefix or suffix)