For the longest time I went about my conversations using the word, snuck, with out ever a
thought of whether or not it is in fact the proper word in the English language. Growing up it was all I ever heard. I believe my teachers even used it and I never heard anyone be corrected in the matter so of course it never occurred to me that the word could be considered improper English. That all changed when I recently, in one of my jump around all the random videos on Youtube moments, which I’m sure many of us have had, saw a clip that had the lovely Jennifer Garner correcting Sir Conan O’Brien that he was in fact wrong when he used the word snuck instead of sneaked. So this started me on a quick search for the truth as to which word is in fact the original word of the English dictionary.
Now I know the half of you who are reading and already know which one it is are probably saying
something close to, oh my goodness I can’t believe he didn’t know that, but hey better late than never and I’m sure I have some useless facts in my head that you had no idea about either so we’re even. So to start my journey, I jumped on to dictionary.com to see if maybe these two words actually differed in any kind of way.
Sneaked – Pronounced SNEEKED – is a verb – Definition: to
move, put, pass, etc., in a stealthy or furtive manner:
He sneaked the gun into his pocket.
Snuck – Pronounced SNUHK – is a verb – Definition: a past
participle and simple past tense of sneak.
Yes they have two completely different interpreted definitions but they mean entirely the same
thing. Now obviously you saw that coming but I just did it for fun since I like to look at all the details when I study something. So to get a closer to real understanding of the word I traveled over to wikipedia. The reason I say closer to real but not entirely true is because wikipedia is not considered a source of actual facts since it’s based on a system that anyone can edit and therefore there’s no proof that what is said on it is true or false unless someone actually gives a reliable source of where they got their information.
To my amazement there was nothing on either word. When I stopped by wiktionary, it actually gave both words the same definition as dictionary.com did for snuck. Upon looking up the general word sneak on wiktionary, it, in the verb section, says as a note:
The past and past participle snuck is primarily found in North American English, where it originated in the late 19th century as a dialectal form, and where it is still regarded as informal by some; its use appears to be increasing in frequency and acceptability. It is sometimes found in British and Australian/Hiberno English too. (Compare The Cambridge Guide to English Usage, Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Webster’s New World College Dictionary).
On top of this, it is said that all of the older spell check programs never accepted snuck as a word when typed in and people would constantly have it flagged for change by the spell check, although now in recent days some new programs are accepting of the word. I looked up on Yahoo, when snuck was first used it the English dictionary, and I came across websters-online-dictionary.org which claims that the word snuck “was first used in the popular English literature: sometime before 1939.” If this claim is true and snuck has been around that long then I believe it would be safe to say that sneaked did come first and is the original word but snuck can easily be used without being told that you’re speaking “improper English.
As far as Miss Garner and Sir Conan go, she was right to correct him as sneaked is the “proper” word, but in today’s dictionary Conan was okay to use the word snuck. So in my eyes they were both right. Another couple of words that are going through the same issues are “hanged” and “hung.” As far as improper words that are becoming acceptable in the English language by constant usage alone, there are two words that are really getting it rough from the general public but are slowly becoming okay to use and that would be ain’t and aren’t which apparently, from what I’ve heard, have already made their way into some versions of the English dictionary, but I’m not going to look into that right now as that’s not the purpose of this article. So to conclude, it’s all up to you and what you prefer. Sneaked or snuck, in my opinion they’re both okay.
