Snowball

How to spell snowball

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce snowball

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does snowball mean?

1. nounA small round mass of packed snow, especially one thrown in play.
2. verbTo grow or increase rapidly through accumulation.

Snowball in a sentence

• noun

  The children packed a snowball and aimed it at the fence.

• verb

  Small debts can quickly snowball into a serious financial problem.

• noun

  A stray snowball hit the window during the lunchtime fight.

• verb

  The minor complaint began to snowball once other customers joined in.

Where does snowball come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Snowball is a plain Germanic compound of two very old native English words. The first element, 'snow', descends from Old English 'snaw', which goes back to the Proto-Germanic 'snaiwaz' and ultimately the Indo-European root that also gave Latin 'nix' and 'nivis'. The second element, 'ball', meaning a round mass or globe, arrived partly from Old Norse and reinforced native Germanic forms. The compound is recorded in Middle English as 'snou-bal' from around the fourteenth century, naming the packed sphere of snow children throw. The figurative verb sense, meaning to grow rapidly by accumulation, only became common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, picturing a ball of snow that gathers more snow and swells as it rolls downhill. Because both parts are ordinary words, the spelling is transparent and rarely causes trouble.

How the word is built

• snow (frozen precipitation)
• ball (round mass); a transparent compound