Schnorchel

Schnorchel (or Schnorkel) is German, dialectally related to schnarchen (to snore) and connected to Schnauze (snout). The word was applied to a submarine air intake device — a tube that could be raised above the surface while the submarine remained submerged, allowing the diesel engines to breathe without fully surfacing. The device looked like a nose or snout poking above the waterline. The word was informal, almost humorous: the submarine had a snout.

The snorkel was critical to German submarine warfare in World War II. By 1944, Allied air superiority made it dangerous for U-boats to surface for air. The snorkel (Schnorchel) allowed a submarine to run its diesel engines and recharge batteries while remaining at periscope depth. The technology was not German in origin — Dutch engineers had developed it before the war — but the German adaptation and the German word became the ones that entered English.

After the war, American and British navies adopted the technology and the word. 'Snorkel' entered English naval vocabulary in the late 1940s. By the 1950s, the word had been applied to the civilian breathing tube used for swimming — a much simpler device that operates on the same principle: a tube that allows breathing while the face is underwater. The military word became a beach toy.

The word's journey from submarine warfare to vacation equipment is one of the most dramatic register shifts in modern English. A device that kept U-boat crews alive during the deadliest naval campaign of the twentieth century is now associated with tropical vacations and coral reefs. The nose that hid from bombers became the tube that watches fish.