![\"A](\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/blog\/snaptin.jpg\")
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On an episode of Uncle Mort’s North Country<\/a>, a comedy drama on Radio 4 Extra that I listened to today, I heard the word snap<\/strong> used for a packed lunch. I’e heard it before, but wasn’t sure where it came from. The drama features two characters from Yorkshire: Uncle Mort and his nephew, Carter Brandon, who both speak with strong Yorkshire accents, so I thought snap might be a Yorkshire word.<\/p>\n I found it in a Yorkshire Dialect Dictionary<\/a> defined as ‘a light meal’, and Wiktionary<\/a> defines it as ‘a small meal, a snack; lunch’.<\/p>\n According to the The Oxford Guide to Etymology<\/a>, lunch boxes were once called snap-tins in parts of the UK, and the word snap came to mean a a light meal or quick bite by metaphorical extension.<\/p>\n In A History of the Word<\/a> on the BBC website it says that miners used snap tins to carry their lunch down the pits – the photo is an example of a miner’s snap tin.<\/p>\n The word snap comes from the Dutch \/ Low German snappen<\/em> \u200e(to bite; seize), from the Proto-Germanic *snapp\u014dn\u0105<\/em> \u200e(to snap; snatch; chatter), from the Proto-Indo-European *ksnew-<\/em> \u200e(to scrape; scratch; grate; rub) [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n What do you call a container you put your lunch in?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On an episode of Uncle Mort’s North Country, a comedy drama on Radio 4 Extra that I listened to today, I heard the word snap used for a packed lunch. I’e heard it before, but wasn’t sure where it came from. The drama features two characters from Yorkshire: Uncle Mort and his nephew, Carter Brandon, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,104,116,10,45,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dutch","category-english","category-german","category-language","category-proto-indo-european","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12989\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}