Snowflake

How to spell snowflake

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce snowflake

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does snowflake mean?

1. nounA single small crystal or cluster of crystals of snow.

Snowflake in a sentence

• Each snowflake that landed on her glove had a different pattern.

• The science museum showed how a single snowflake forms in the clouds.

Where does snowflake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound of two old, native words. The first half, snow, descends from the Old English snaw, which traces back to a shared Germanic ancestor and ultimately a much older root meaning frozen water that fell from the sky; close cousins survive across the Germanic languages, such as the German Schnee. The second half, flake, meaning a small, thin, loose fragment, appears in Middle English and is generally tied to a Scandinavian source, with Old Norse relatives describing a flat piece or scale. Joined together, snowflake simply names a single small piece of falling snow, a usage recorded from around the 1700s. The spelling is reassuringly phonetic apart from the silent, decorative letters that pad each half, and in recent years the word has also picked up a dismissive slang sense for an over-sensitive person.

How the word is built

• snow (frozen precipitation, from Old English snaw)
• flake (a small flat fragment)