Snuck

How to spell snuck

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce snuck

What does snuck mean?

1. verbMoved quietly and secretly so as to avoid being noticed; the past tense and past participle of sneak.

Snuck in a sentence

• She snuck out of the office before anyone could stop her.

• The cat snuck into the warm kitchen during the storm.

Where does snuck come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Snuck is a relatively young past tense of the verb sneak, whose own history is a little murky. Sneak itself probably descends from the Old English snican, meaning 'to creep or crawl', the same family of words that gave us 'snake' as a creature that slinks along the ground. For centuries the regular past tense was simply 'sneaked'. Then in nineteenth century American English a new form, snuck, sprang up by analogy with strong verbs such as stick/stuck and strike/struck, where a vowel change marks the past. Once dismissed as nonstandard or dialectal, snuck steadily climbed in respectability and is now widely accepted on both sides of the Atlantic, though some careful writers still prefer 'sneaked'. The simple spelling, with no silent letters, makes it an easy word once you remember the single n and the c-k ending.

How the word is built

• snuck (irregular past tense and past participle of the verb sneak, formed by analogy with patterns like stick/stuck)