December 21, 1998

snuck

I have always thought of "sneak" as a regular verb and believed that "snuck" as its past tense was very poor usage. Now I seem to see it everywhere (I read a lot of mysteries), pretty much to the exclusion of "sneaked." Has usage changed, or have I been under a mis-apprehension all my life?

Usage has changed.

The base form sneak is of uncertain origin--it seems likely to be related to Old English snícan 'to creep; sneak along', but some issues of the vowels are problematic. Like so many others, sneak is first recorded in the works of Shakespeare, who uses it several times: "A poor, unminded outlaw, sneaking home" (Henry IV, part I); "Sneak not away, sir; for the friar and you must have a word" (Measure for Measure); and others.

For much of its history, sneak had as its past tense and past participle sneaked, a regular form. In the late nineteenth century, though, a new form snuck arose in the United States. How this form arose is itself uncertain--there are no other "-eek" verbs with an "-uck" past tense or participle that could have provided a basis for analogy.

The earliest examples for snuck appear only in written representations of dialect or other nonstandard use. For instance, the New Orleans Lantern in 1887 had the sentence, "He grubbed ten dollars from de bums an den snuck home." This and other examples suggest that snuck was limited to the speech of uneducated, rural Americans.

By the 1930s or so, snuck began to be more common in various dialect sources, and we also start to find examples use for humorous effect in other contexts, similar to the use of ain't in mainstream newspapers and magazines today. Since the 1950s, snuck has been found with increasingly frequency in neutral contexts--used as a standard past form in written sources without any suggestion of humorous intent.

In present-day English, snuck is extremely widespread throughout the country, even among educated speakers, and in the speech of younger people it is the dominant form. Many younger speakers are unaware that sneaked exists, or think that it sounds as wrong as many older speakers think snuck does. It is absolutely incorrect to say that snuck is "nonstandard," as one current usage book does, or even that it's "wrong," as many people believe. It is not even "informal" or "jocose," as one reasonably up-to-date book says. Snuck is fully standard in American English.

Many people object to snuck, but that has been changing and is likely to change further as younger snuck-ful speakers age and enter the mainstream. Sneaked is still somewhat more common in print, but that is probably reflective of the fact that sneaked is favored by more conservative editors and copy editors.

In British English sneaked remains the usual past form, with snuck appearing only in humorous or nonstandard use.