Snow

How to spell snow

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce snow

What does snow mean?

1. nounSoft white flakes of frozen water that fall from the sky and settle on the ground.
2. verbTo fall as snow from the sky.

Snow in a sentence

• noun

  A thick layer of snow covered the car overnight.

• verb

  It began to snow just as the commuters left the office.

• noun

  The forecast warned of heavy snow across the mountains.

• verb

  Meteorologists expect it to snow heavily before dawn.

Where does snow come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English snāw, the native Anglo-Saxon name for frozen precipitation, and it has been part of English for as long as the language has existed. It traces back through the Proto-Germanic snaiwaz, which gave related words in many neighbouring tongues, including the German Schnee and the Dutch sneeuw. Further back still, scholars reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European root sneigwh, meaning 'to snow' or 'snow', the same ancient source behind the Latin nix (snow) and its stem niv-, which survives in English borrowings like 'niveous'. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable, with the modern 'ow' ending simply representing the long vowel that the old āw spelling once carried. Because it is such an old, core word, the form is short and the spelling holds few surprises.

How the word is built

• snow (single root from Old English snāw; no prefix or suffix)