Other forms: sniffing, sniffs, sniffed
To sniff is to pull air in sharply through your nose, hard enough to hear. A dog working along the bottom of a hedge, a child with a cold on the bus, you holding the milk up and checking whether it has turned.
Sniff is a noun too: 'she gave the milk a sniff', 'a loud sniff from the back row'. Because sniffing is what you do when you are crying or looking down your nose at something, it picked up feeling. To sniff at an offer is to treat it as beneath you, and 'not to be sniffed at' means the reverse — that a thing is worth having. Sniff out means to find something by searching hard: dogs sniff out drugs, reporters sniff out a story. Keep it apart from sniffle, which is the wet repeated version you get with a cold, and from snort, which is loud and goes outwards. You sniff AT a person you disdain, but you sniff a flower with no preposition at all.
1verbsniffTo breathe in sharply through the nose, loudly enough to be heard.
“He sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve.”
2verbsmellTo smell something by breathing in through the nose.
“She sniffed the milk and poured it straight down the sink.”
3verbscoffTo show that you think something is not good enough.
“He sniffed at the offer and went back to his newspaper.”
synonyms: scoff
4nounsingleA single act of breathing in through the nose.
“One sniff of the fish was enough to settle the question.”
Sniff has no long ancestry to chase. It turns up in Middle English as sniffen and it is simply the noise written down. English keeps a whole nose-cupboard of words made the same way — sniff, snuffle, snort, snore — and they all start with the same two letters.
Middle English
sniffen
English, today
sniff
From Middle English sniffen, of imitative of the sound origin.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA