Snowy

How to spell snowy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce snowy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does snowy mean?

1. adjectiveCovered with snow, or marked by falling snow.

Snowy in a sentence

• The village looked beautiful under a snowy blanket all winter.

• They cancelled the morning flight because of the snowy runway.

Where does snowy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word is built on the native English noun 'snow', which descends from Old English 'snaw', the word Anglo-Saxons used for falling and fallen flakes of frozen water. That noun has deep roots across the Germanic languages, with close relatives in Dutch 'sneeuw' and German 'Schnee', all tracing back to an ancient Indo-European root meaning 'snow' that also survives in Latin 'nix' and 'nivis'. The adjective form was made simply by adding the productive suffix '-y', which English has long used to turn a noun into a describing word meaning 'full of' or 'covered with'. So 'snowy' literally means 'covered in or characterised by snow', a pattern matched by pairs such as 'rain' and 'rainy' or 'cloud' and 'cloudy'. The spelling stays neatly regular here: the silent final touch is just the 'w' from 'snow' kept intact before the added 'y'.

How the word is built

• snow (frozen precipitation)
• -y (adjective suffix: full of, covered with)