{"id":9714,"date":"2014-03-08T15:14:44","date_gmt":"2014-03-08T15:14:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=9714"},"modified":"2014-03-08T15:14:44","modified_gmt":"2014-03-08T15:14:44","slug":"a-snell-wind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=9714","title":{"rendered":"A Snell Wind"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Scots phrase, <strong>a snell wind<\/strong>, appears in one of the books I&#8217;m reading at the moment, and as I hadn&#8217;t come across it before it mystified me a bit. It&#8217;s some kind of wind, but what kind?<\/p>\n<p>According to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oed.com\/view\/Entry\/183173?rskey=AShYsp&#038;result=2&#038;isAdvanced=false#eid\">OED<\/a>, snell is a Scots and Northern English word meaning:<\/p>\n<p>1. (of a person) quick in movement or action; prompt, smart, active, strenuous<br \/>\n2. keen-witted, clever, sharp, acute, smart<br \/>\n3. severe, sharp, unsparing<br \/>\n4. (of weather) keen, bitter, severe<br \/>\n5. grievous, heavy, stinging; rigorous; painful<br \/>\n6. shrill, clear-sounding<\/p>\n<p>So it seems that the most likely meaning for a snell wind is a bitter one.<\/p>\n<p>Snell comes from the Middle English <em>snell<\/em> (quick, fast) from the Old English <em>snel(l)<\/em>, from the Proto-Germanic <em>*snellaz<\/em> (active, swift, brisk). It is cognate with the German <em>schnell<\/em> (quick, swift, active), the Italian <em>snello<\/em> (quick, nimble), the Old French <em>esnel\/isnel<\/em> (snell), and the Occitan <em>isnel\/irnel<\/em> (snell), the Old Norse <em>snjallr<\/em> (skilful, excellent), the Swedish <em>sn\u00e4ll<\/em> (nice, kind, kind-hearted, decent, clever, benignant) and the Danish <em>snild<\/em> (clever) [<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/snell\">source<\/a>]. <\/p>\n<p>A related word is snellness (sharpness, keenness).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Scots phrase, a snell wind, appears in one of the books I&#8217;m reading at the moment, and as I hadn&#8217;t come across it before it mystified me a bit. It&#8217;s some kind of wind, but what kind? According to the OED, snell is a Scots and Northern English word meaning: 1. (of a person) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,104,107,116,128,10,55,67,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-danish","category-english","category-etymology","category-german","category-italian","category-language","category-scots","category-swedish","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9714","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=9714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9714\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}