Snack
nounA small amount of food eaten between regular meals.
How to spell snack
5 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce snack
What does snack mean?
- nounA small amount of food eaten between regular meals.
- verbTo eat a small amount of food between meals.
Snack in a sentence
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noun
She packed an apple as a snack for the long train journey.
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verb
She tends to snack on crisps while watching television.
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noun
The vending machine sells the same snack in every office.
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verb
Dieticians warn that we snack far more than we realise.
Where does snack come from?
Language of origin: Dutch
Snack came into English in the late 1300s from Middle Dutch and Middle Low German, where the verb snacken meant 'to bite' or 'to snap at', much as a dog snaps its jaws shut. That biting sense is why the earliest English uses of the word referred to a snap or a sudden bite rather than to food. By the 1700s the noun had softened into its modern meaning: a small, hasty bite of something to eat, taken between proper meals. The word is closely related to 'snatch', which also carries the idea of grabbing something quickly, and that family resemblance fits the casual, grab-and-go nature of a snack. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, with the 'sn' and the hard final 'ck' both doing exactly what they look like.
How the word is built
- snack (single root, originally meaning a snap or bite)
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