sneeze

SNEEZ/sniːz/

Verbsneezes, sneezing, sneezed

Noun pluralsneezes

4 meanings of sneeze

Practice

1
verbintransitive
To suddenly expel air from the nose and mouth as a reflex caused by irritation in the nose.
Bright sunlight can make some people sneeze.
He sneezed loudly during the lecture.
Note
A medical sign with deep roots: Middle English snesen is an alteration of earlier fnesen, from Old English fnēosan, 'to sneeze, snort', and ultimately from a root meaning to breathe, pant or snort. Health advice pairs it with into: sneeze into your sleeve, into a tissue. The past is the regular sneezed. The obsolete snoze survives only as a joke.
2
nouncountable
A single instance of sharply expelling air from the nose and mouth as a reflex.
A single sneeze can release thousands of tiny droplets into the air.
She stifled the sneeze, and her ears popped.
Similarsternutation
3
verbtransitive
To expel or displace air, mucus, or similar matter from the nose or mouth by sneezing.
He sneezed crumbs across the kitchen table.
Patients are told to sneeze any loose mucus into a tissue.
Note
Here the verb takes an object: whatever the sneeze sends out, or knocks away. In Hugh Wiley's The Prowler (1924), Lily sneezes a blue-bottle fly off the tip of her nose, so the object need not come from inside at all. The object can even be the sound itself, as in Gunleen Deol's Sleepover Disaster (2010): I sneezed a big achoo!
4
verbintransitive
To expel air from the nose as though it were irritated, even when it is not.
Children sometimes sneeze on purpose just to be funny.
She faked a stumble and then sneezed dramatically for the camera.

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Origin

From Middle English snesen, an alteration of earlier fnesen, from Old English fnēosan ("to sneeze, snort"), going back through Proto-Germanic *fneusaną to Proto-Indo-European *pnew- ("to breathe, pant, snort, sneeze"). It is related to dialectal Dutch fniezen and Old Norse fnýsa ("to snort"). The shift from fn- to sn- may be due to the uncommon initial fn- being misread as ſn- (sn- written with a long s), the same change seen in snore and snort; the fn- forms fell out of use in the 1400s.