Snail

How to spell snail

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce snail

What does snail mean?

1. nounA small soft-bodied creature that moves slowly and carries a spiral shell on its back.

Snail in a sentence

• A snail left a glistening trail across the garden path.

• The gardener found a snail hiding among the lettuce leaves.

Where does snail come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Snail comes straight from the Old English snægl, the native Anglo-Saxon name for the small, slow, shell-bearing creature. That word traces back to a Germanic source, related to the Old High German snegil and the Old Norse snigill, and ultimately to a root that also gave us 'snake' and the dialect word 'snake' for a slithering thing, all suggesting something that creeps or crawls. Because the word is genuinely ancient and native rather than borrowed, its spelling has been settled in English for well over a thousand years. The silent-looking 'sn-' opening it shares with snake, snare and snout points to a family of words about creeping or low movement. The spelling 'snail' has barely changed in form, which is why it rarely trips up modern writers.

How the word is built

• snail (a single, unanalysable Old English root; no prefix or suffix)