Other forms: snows, snowed, snowing
Snow is soft white flakes of frozen water falling in winter. It settles, muffles every sound, and turns grey within a day.
It works as a verb with no real subject, as in it snowed all night. English keeps a small vocabulary around it: sleet is half melted, a blizzard is snow driven by wind, and slush is what you are left with. Snowed under is the standard phrase for having far too much work. And a snowball effect names something small that grows as it goes, which is exactly what a snowball rolled downhill does.
1nounsnowSoft white frozen flakes that fall in cold weather.~98%
“The snow lay a foot deep in the lane.”
2verbfallOf snow, to fall.~2%
“It snowed for three days without stopping.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Snow has hardly shifted at all: Old English snāw, Proto-Germanic snaiwaz, and a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to snow. The noun and the verb have always been one word.
Middle English
snow
English, today
snow
Built from
From Middle English snow. The noun is derived from Middle English snaw, snou, snow (“snow; accumulation of snow; snowfall; snowstorm; whiteness”), from Old English snāw (“snow”), from Proto-West Germanic snaiw (“snow”), from Proto-Germanic snaiwaz (“snow”), from Proto-Indo-European snóygʷʰos (“snow”), from sneygʷʰ- (“to snow”). The verb is derived from Middle English snouen (“to snow; (figurative) to shower”), from snou, snow (see above) + -en. snīwan, whence English snew obsolete.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA