Other forms: snoring, snores
To snore is to make that rough rattling noise while you sleep, as the breath catches at the back of your throat. The man in the next seat on a night flight, a dog on its side by the fire, your grandfather in the armchair with the television still on.
There is a noun as well: one loud snore, a chorus of snores from the tent. Snoring is the habit, the thing people buy nose strips and separate bedrooms for. It belongs to sleep and nowhere else — a person breathing loudly while awake wheezes, pants or snorts, but does not snore. Informally you can call something dull a snore: the second half was a total snore. The verb is regular, and you snore, full stop — you do not snore a noise.
1verbsnoreTo breathe with a loud rough rattling noise while asleep.
“He snores so loudly that the dog leaves the room.”
2nounsleepingOne such noise made while sleeping.
“A long snore came from behind the newspaper.”
3nounextremelySomething extremely boring.
“The lecture was a two-hour snore.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
snore is a breathing noise.
Snore used to begin with fn. Old English had fnora, a snort or a sneeze, from a Proto-Germanic *fnuzô and a Proto-Indo-European root *pnew- that meant to breathe, snort, sneeze. English later found fn- impossible to say and swapped it for sn-, which is why Middle English snoren sat alongside fnoren. Sneeze lost its f the same way: it was once fnesen.
Proto-Indo-European
*pnew-
Middle English
snoren
English, today
snore
Built from
From Middle English snoren, fnoren (“to snore loudly; snort”), from Middle English snore, fnore (“snore; snort”), from Old English fnora (“snort; sneezing”), from Proto-Germanic fnuzô, from Proto-Indo-European pnew- (“to breathe; snort; sneeze”). Compare also Proto-West Germanic snarkōn, Middle Low German snorren (“to drone”), Dutch snorren (“to hum, purr”). The change fn → sn in this word is regular, seen also in sneeze, from Middle English fnesen (see sneeze for more).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA