sneeze
/sniːz
/verb [no object]
Make a sudden involuntary expulsion of air from the nose and mouth due to irritation of one’s nostrils: the smoke made her sneeze...
- The same pressure may cause you to leak urine when sneezing, coughing or laughing.
- Colds typically spread through infected respiratory droplets coughed or sneezed into the air.
- The flu virus is usually spread in the small droplets of saliva coughed or sneezed into the atmosphere by an infected person.
noun
An act or the sound of sneezing: he stopped a sudden sneeze...
- Suddenly, more sounds of sneezes reached my ears as Angela and Sara pounded into my room, both their noses tinged slightly pink and twitching, rabbit-like.
- Just then, from the sleeping alcove, came the unmistakable sound of sneezes.
- The sound of the sneeze seemed to break everyone else out of their concentration as everyone else was staring at their direction.
Phrases
not to be sneezed at
Derivatives
sneezer
- The goal is to help organizations launch great products by bringing them directly to the sneezers who can spread the word.
- Avoid close contact, especially with sneezers or coughers.
- Always begin by infecting your core audience of sneezers.
sneezy
- Allergies make people dopey and sleepy as well as sneezy.
- I'm either having some kind of major allergy attack or coming down with an extremely sneezy cold, so in between constant sneezing and antihistamine-induced drowsiness, I'm good for very little right now.
- There are some sensible ways to get over a miserable, runny, achy-breaky, head-full-of-gunge, coughy, sneezy, won't-go-away cold, and I do not recommend this as one of them.
Origin
Middle English: apparently an alteration of Middle English fnese due to misreading or misprinting (after initial fn- had become unfamiliar), later adopted because it sounded appropriate.
When we get a cold we should really start fneezing rather than sneezing. This is because the word comes from medieval English fnese. People were not used to seeing the fn- combination at the beginning of a word by then, and someone must have mistaken f for the long medieval s, which looked like an f without a cross bar, and written it down as sn- instead.