Other forms: snags
A snag is a hidden difficulty. Hit a snag, one small snag, a technical snag.
There is always a snag is the standard British response to any plan. It also means a tear caught on something sharp: a snag in her tights, snagged on a nail. As a verb, to snag is to catch and tear, and in American informal use to snag something means to grab it. Note snagging list, which in building is the list of small faults to be fixed before handover.
2nounsnagA tear caught on something sharp.
“Her sleeve caught on the barbed wire, leaving an ugly snag in the wool.”
snag is a catch or difficulty.
Old Norse snagi meant a peg or projecting point. A snag was a stump or jagged branch in a river that caught boats, and the hidden-difficulty sense comes straight from that hazard.
Old Norse
snagi — clothes peg
Middle English
*snagge
English, today
snag
Built from
From earlier snag (“stump or branch of a tree”), from Middle English snagge, snage, from Old Norse snagi (“clothes peg”) (compare Old Norse snag-hyrndr (“snag-horned, having jagged corners”)), perhaps related to sneganą, snakaną (“to crawl, creep, wind about”) if the original meaning of the root sneg- was more like pointy object, stinging creature. Note also snakkōną (“to snap at, smack the lips; to blow”) (German schnacken (“to chat”)) and sneck, snatch. Compare Norwegian snag, snage (“protrusion; projecting point”), Icelandic snagi (“peg”). Also see the Dutch --origin fish names a doublet of snoek and snook.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire