Other forms: snorkels
A snorkel is a tube that lets you breathe with your face down. Wear a snorkel, clear the snorkel, a mask and snorkel.
It cannot be made much longer than about forty centimetres, because below that the water pressure on the chest makes it impossible to draw breath. Clearing it is a sharp blow out at the surface. The word came from the submarine's air tube.
1nounsnorkelA tube that lets you breathe with your face down.
“With a mask and snorkel, we watched colourful fish swim over the reef.”
snorkel is a tube.
German Schnorchel named a submarine's air tube, related to schnarchen, to snore.
German
Schnorchel — (submarine) snorkel
English, today
snorkel
Built from
German Schnorchel (“(submarine) snorkel”), related to schnarchen (“to snore”). Thus named because of the submarine snorkel's functional similarity to a nose and because of its noise when in use. The anglicized spelling was first recorded in 1945. See, for example, Mark S. Watson, "New Epoch in Sea War", The Baltimore Sun, December 31, 1945, p. 8: "The Germans' earlier quest of the last important objective, it will be remembered, had produced the Snorkel, a long exhaust tube whose vent reached above water and permitted a submerged vessel to discharge its Diesel fumes in open air."
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA