Other forms: sneaks, sneaking, sneaked
To sneak is to move so quietly that nobody notices you. Down the stairs at two in the morning, past a sleeping dog, out of a long meeting through the back door.
You sneak somewhere, and you also sneak things: sneak a look at your phone, sneak sweets into the cinema, sneak out for a cigarette. To sneak up on someone is to arrive behind them unheard. As an adjective it means without warning, as in a sneak attack or a sneak preview of a film. In a British school a sneak is the child who tells the teacher what the others did, which is why sneaky means underhand rather than merely quiet. The past form is sneaked, though plenty of people say snuck.
1verbsneakTo go somewhere quietly and secretly so that nobody sees you.~17%
“He sneaked out of the house before anyone woke up.”
2verbtakeTo take, give or do something quickly and secretly.~16%
“She sneaked a look at the answers on his desk.”
3nounchildA person, especially a child, who tells someone in authority what the others have done.~2%
“Nobody sat with him after that; he was the class sneak.”
4adjectiveshownDone or shown without warning.~65%
“They were given a sneak preview of the new album.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Sneak most likely grew out of Middle English sniken and Old English snican, 'to creep, crawl', from Proto-Germanic *snikana with the same meaning. Danish snige and Icelandic snikja are its living relatives. English keeps a whole nest of sn- words for the furtive, among them snake, snoop and snoot, though sneak is not formally related to any of them; the sound simply suits the job.
Proto-Germanic
*snīkaną — to creep, crawl
Proto-West Germanic
*snīkan
Old English
snīcan — to creep, crawl
Middle English
sniken — to creep, crawl
English, today
sneak
Possibly from Middle English sniken (“to creep, crawl”), from Old English snīcan (“to creep, crawl”), from Proto-West Germanic snīkan, from Proto-Germanic snīkaną (“to creep, crawl”), of origin; compare formally unrelated snake, snoop, snook, snoke and snoot. Cognate with Danish snige (“to sneak”), Swedish snika (“to sneak, hanker after”), Icelandic sníkja (“to sneak, hanker after”). Possibly related to a doublet of snitch.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA