Snowman

How to spell snowman

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce snowman

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does snowman mean?

1. nounA figure of a person built out of packed snow, typically with a round body and head.

Snowman in a sentence

• The children rolled three large balls to build a snowman in the front garden.

• A carrot served as the nose of the snowman on the village green.

Where does snowman come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining 'snow' and 'man', both of which are ancient native words from Old English. 'Snow' descends from the Old English 'snaw', which traces back to a shared Germanic root and ultimately to a Proto-Indo-European word for frozen precipitation; close relatives appear across Europe, from German 'Schnee' to Latin 'nix'. 'Man' comes from Old English 'mann', originally meaning simply a human being or person before it narrowed toward its modern sense. The combined word 'snowman', describing a human figure modelled out of packed snow, is comparatively recent in writing, appearing in English around the early nineteenth century as winter pastimes were increasingly described in print. Because both halves are familiar everyday words, the spelling holds no hidden traps; the only thing to remember is that it is written as a single closed compound.

How the word is built

• snow (frozen precipitation)
• man (figure shaped like a person)