Other forms: sneezing, sneezes, sneezed
A sneeze is the sudden burst of air your nose throws out when something tickles it: dust, pepper, a step into bright sun. The achoo you cannot stop halfway, the one that comes in threes, the one that arrives the moment the photo is taken.
It is both noun and verb: you feel a sneeze coming, then you sneeze, and English answers with Bless you. Hay fever brings them in runs, and a sneezing fit is a run you cannot stop. Sneeze into your elbow, not your hand, which is the advice on every poster in every waiting room. And if something is not to be sneezed at, it is worth more than it sounds: a discount like that is not to be sneezed at.
Sneeze used to start with fn-. Old English fneosan, to sneeze or snort, came from Proto-Germanic *fneusana and the Proto-Indo-European root *pnew-, to breathe, pant, snort, sneeze, with the noise of the thing built into the root. The change to sn- may be a reading mistake: fn- was a rare way to begin a word, and one suggestion is that scribes took the f for the old long s. The misreading stuck, and we have been sneezing ever since.
Proto-Indo-European
*pnew- — to breathe, pant, snort, sneeze
Proto-Germanic
*fneusaną
Proto-West Germanic
*fneusan
Old English
fnēosan — to sneeze, snort
Middle English
snesen — to sneeze
English, today
sneeze
Built from
From Middle English snesen (“to sneeze”), alteration of earlier fnesen (“to sneeze”), from Old English fnēosan (“to sneeze, snort”), from Proto-West Germanic fneusan, from Proto-Germanic fneusaną, from Proto-Indo-European pnew- (“to breathe, pant, snort, sneeze”). Cognate with dialectal Dutch fniezen (“to sneeze”), Old Norse fnýsa (“to snort”). Compare neeze, from Middle English nesen, from Old English hnēosan (“to sneeze”), cognate with Old High German niosan (“to sneeze”), Old Norse hnjósa (“to sneeze”). See neeze. It has been suggested that the change could be due to a misinterpretation of the uncommon initial sequence fn- as ſn- (sn- written with a long s), although the change is regular, seen also in snore and snort from Middle English fnoren and fnorten, and in late Middle English snatted from earlier Middle English fnatted (“snub-nosed”). The fn- forms of all these words fell out of use in the 1400s. Due to this rather universal adoption of the fn- > sn- shift within English by such a time frame, the idea of it being a simple sound shift has been suggested as well, with it specifically being a type of assimilation as the labial f- becomes alveolar s- to match the place of articulation of the following n-.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Body & Health