My husband and I are a very snuggly couple, so it was only a matter of time before one of said, “I wonder where the word snuggle comes from? Clearly snug, but…like, tight? Because you’re coming in close?”
Turns out…not exactly. Because the “tight” meaning of snug is actually one of the latest to the game.
Snug‘s original meaning dates from the 1590s and was “compact, trim” or “protected from the weather,” specifically of ships. Related words in Scandinavian languages are snoggr, snugg, and snøg, which meant things like “neat and tidy” or even “short-haired.”
In the early 1600s, that idea of being tidy and protected had morphed into “in a state of ease or comfort.” We see this still in the expression (from the 1760s) of “snug as a bug in a rug.”
Snuggle dates from the 1680s, meaning “to move this way and that to get close to something for warmth or affection,” presumably from that notion of “state of comfort.”
The British slang of snog/snogging for a snuggle or kissing is a variation on the spelling that harkens back to those Scandinavian roots and dates from around 1945.
In my own family history, my kids made snug a verb when they were little, proclaiming that the cats were “snugging up against” their legs. I now can’t think of that particular feline habit by any other name, LOL.
Word Nerds Unite!
Read More Word of the Week Posts
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 
