Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A snicker.
  • intransitive verb To snicker.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A variant of snicker.
  • See the quotation.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • intransitive verb See snicker.
  • noun See snicker.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A partly suppressed or broken laugh.
  • noun A sly or snide laugh.
  • verb intransitive To emit a snigger.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a disrespectful laugh
  • verb laugh quietly

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Perhaps alteration of snicker.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

British variant pronunciation and spelling of snicker. This definition is lacking an etymology or has an incomplete etymology. You can help Wiktionary by giving it a proper etymology.

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Examples

  • So, eight beautiful girls on a hen night, two men with funny hats, a uni-cyclist (???) and three lads dressed as penguins all walk past without even a comment or a snigger from the F Division Public Order team.

    Oh How We Laughed……But Not Too Loudly. « POLICE INSPECTOR BLOG Inspector Gadget 2010

  • The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel.

    The Lion and the Unicorn 1941

  • And for the record, Mickey Kaus didn't "snigger" - for being unaware of the situation, he registered his surprise in a very calm fashion, especially in light of how Bob Wright was hamming it up.

    An article in the New York Times: "Commoner Captures Princess, Blog Version." Ann Althouse 2009

  • If you ask for miel, you’ll certainly be understood, but you might get a snigger from the shopkeeper.

    Albures, or Dirty Spanish 101 2009

  • If you ask for miel, you’ll certainly be understood, but you might get a snigger from the shopkeeper.

    Albures, or Dirty Spanish 101 2009

  • If you ask for miel, you’ll certainly be understood, but you might get a snigger from the shopkeeper.

    Albures, or Dirty Spanish 101 2009

  • If you ask for miel, you’ll certainly be understood, but you might get a snigger from the shopkeeper.

    Albures, or Dirty Spanish 101 2009

  • If you ask for miel, you’ll certainly be understood, but you might get a snigger from the shopkeeper.

    Albures, or Dirty Spanish 101 2009

  • Christine made a sound that I would have called snigger if it had issued from someone less patrician.

    Dead As A Doornail Harris, Charlaine 2005

  • When he tells people what he does for a living, they snigger, which is perhaps preferable to the scowl he got in the last years of working at Goldman: Banking used to be sexy.

    Evening Standard - Home Rosamund Urwin 2011

Comments

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  • snicker

    July 26, 2007

  • It's a funny word but I hate to type it lest someone skip over the first letter somehow when they're reading it.

    July 27, 2007

  • Then they would need to take a second look, wouldn't they? I remember a perhaps-apocryphal story aout a crusade against the word niggardly. There is enough genuinely racist speech to object to; we don't need to imagine it where it does not exist.

    July 27, 2007

  • Slumry, if it's the news I'm thinking of, it wasn't apocryphal. Such a fuss over a word that merely sounded offensive....

    July 27, 2007

  • I most certainly agree. We're a bunch of softies, we are.

    July 27, 2007