snacken

The English word 'snack' comes from Middle Dutch snacken, meaning 'to snap' or 'to bite sharply,' related to snappen (to snap, to seize with the mouth). The earliest sense in English, recorded from the mid-seventeenth century, was 'a share' or 'a bite' — as in, to take one's snack of something. The verb 'to snack' (to eat a small amount between meals) developed in the eighteenth century, and the noun 'snack' in the sense of 'a small casual meal' solidified in the same period. The word belongs to a cluster of Germanic snap-and-bite words that entered English through the intensive Dutch-English maritime and commercial contact of the seventeenth century.

Middle Dutch was a remarkably productive donor language for English during the period of heavy Anglo-Dutch trade and rivalry, roughly 1500 to 1700. The Netherlands and England competed fiercely for commercial supremacy — in herring fisheries, in textile markets, in colonial trade routes — while simultaneously borrowing heavily from each other's vocabularies. Dutch sailors, merchants, and craftspeople worked in English ports and brought their words with them. Snacken was exactly the kind of vivid, physical verb that crossed languages easily: it described a universal action, the sharp decisive bite, with an onomatopoeic quality that made it immediately comprehensible.

The word 'snack' in its modern sense — a small, casual, between-meals bite — is really a product of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as urban commercial food culture developed in Britain. Coffeehouses, taverns, and street vendors sold small quantities of food throughout the day, and English needed a word for this informal eating that was distinct from 'meal' or 'supper.' Snack filled this gap precisely. By the nineteenth century it was fully established, and the word traveled with British commercial culture to the United States and the British colonies.

The twentieth century gave 'snack' its industrial dimension. The packaged snack food industry — crisps, crackers, pretzels, and their descendants — built an entire category around the word. 'Snack food,' 'snack time,' 'snack bar,' 'snack pack': the Dutch verb for a sharp bite became the name for a multi-billion-dollar category of manufactured convenience eating. The snap of the jaw is still there in the word, though the jaw now bites on extruded corn and flavored potato starch rather than whatever came to hand.