the.com/snack
A meal's little sibling — smaller, cuter, and way less responsible.
means A small amount of food eaten between meals, usually to tide you over rather than to actually feed you.
from Traces back to the Middle English/Dutch word 'snac' or 'snacken', meaning to bite or snap — originally the sharp bite of a dog's jaws. Through Dutch and Flemish use it drifted into the sense of a quick, hasty bite of food, and by the 1700s English had borrowed it for exactly that: a small bite grabbed on the run. The dog-snap origin is well-established, not folklore — your snack really is, etymologically, a little bite.
- original meaning
- a quick bite or snap, often canine
- slang upgrade
- calling an attractive person a snack, 2016-ish
- industry size
- global snack market worth hundreds of billions yearly
- etymological cousin
- related to snatch, both about grabbing fast