snivel

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 20, 2024 is:

snivel • \SNIV-ul\ • verb

To snivel is to speak or act in a whining, sniffling, tearful, or weakly emotional manner. The word snivel may also be used to mean "to run at the nose," "to snuffle," or "to cry or whine with snuffling."

// She was unmoved by the millionaires sniveling about their financial problems.

// My partner sniveled into the phone, describing the frustrations of the day.

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Examples:

"At first, he ran a highway stop with video gambling. 'To sit and do nothing for 10 to 12 hours drove me nuts,' he [Frank Nicolette] said. That's when he found art. 'I started making little faces, and they were selling so fast, I'll put pants and shirts on these guys,' he said, referring to his hand-carved sculptures. 'Then (people) whined and sniveled and wanted bears, and so I started carving some bears.'" — Benjamin Simon, The Post & Courier (Charleston, South Carolina), 5 Oct. 2024

Did you know?

There's never been anything pretty about sniveling. Snivel, which originally meant simply "to have a runny nose," has an Old English ancestor whose probable form was snyflan. Its lineage includes some other charming words of yore: an Old English word for mucus, snofl; the Middle Dutch word for a head cold, snof; the Old Norse word for snout, which is snoppa; and nan, a Greek verb meaning "to flow." Nowadays, we mostly use snivel as we have since the 1600s: when self-pitying whining is afoot, whether or not such sniveling is accompanied by unchecked nasal flow.