sneeze
/sniːz/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.19 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "To avoid passing on your illness, you should sneeze into your sleeve."
- "Lily shook her head violently and sneezed a large blue-bottle fly from where that insect had perched itself on the tip of her nose."
- "When I crossed the road, I sneezed a big achoo! My nose started to feel itchy."
- "I sneezed a big sneeze. It was so big I hit my nose on the sidewalk. Bow-ow. There was a smell in my snout that I wanted to get rid of. And it wasn't Muffet's rotten soup odor, either. That was actually kind of delicious."
- "“Okay,”he said, and sneezed a large drop of pinkish goop. “But you better have a lot to eat! I'll race you upstairs!” Wilmer shook his head. Sherman's hyper energy level seemed to have increased, and that was saying a lot."
- "Toothless sneezed a large amount of dragon snot right in Hiccup's face."
Etymology
From Middle English snesen (“to sneeze”), alteration of earlier fnesen (“to sneeze”), from Old English fnēosan (“to sneeze, snort”), from Proto-West Germanic *fneusan, from Proto-Germanic *fneusaną, from Proto-Indo-European *pnew- (“to breathe, pant, snort, sneeze”). Cognate with dialectal Dutch fniezen (“to sneeze”), Old Norse fnýsa (“to snort”). Compare neeze, from Middle English nesen, from Old English *hnēosan (“to sneeze”), cognate with Old High German niosan (“to sneeze”), Old Norse hnjósa (“to sneeze”). See neeze. It has been suggested that the change could be due to a misinterpretation of the uncommon initial sequence fn- as ſn- (sn- written with a long s), although the change is regular, seen also in snore and snort from Middle English fnoren and fnorten, and in late Middle English snatted from earlier Middle English fnatted (“snub-nosed”). The fn- forms of all these words fell out of use in the 1400s. Due to this rather universal adoption of the fn- > sn- shift within English by such a time frame, the idea of it being a simple sound shift has been suggested as well, with it specifically being a type of assimilation as the labial f- becomes alveolar s- to match the place of articulation of the following n-.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *pnew-, snesen, fnēosan, *fneusan, *fneusaną