snug
/snʌɡ
/- Jake's soft against me, pulled up, and I've leant my head against his chest and his arm's round me and it's comfortable and snug and warm, and nice.
- They all made themselves comfortable inside their snug and warm sleeping bags.
- Still, once a fire is crackling, it is a warm, snug shelter.
Synonyms
- She is a tall and slim model-like blond with blue eyes and wrapped in a snug coat with some black pants and tennis shoes also.
- The fit should be snug but not confining - remember, they'll stretch a bit with use.
- The fit is quite snug, and I don't think this will be detrimental in performance.
Synonyms
- It's such an unusual shape, with nooks and crannies and little attic bedrooms here and little snugs there.
- We pass on, pausing only a couple of times for me to bump my head on bits of metal protruding from various ladders, down into a room that looks like the snug of a golf-club bar.
- He laughs, snugging his cap down over his monk's coif of graying hair.
- We hike back to the boat, snug our life jackets, and push off, the first set of waves and holes going by almost without my notice.
- Thread the tube on and off a few times without snugging it down to make sure it's spinning down fully where it should.
- I was also wearing the toastiest socks on God's Green Earth and I had brought down the spare duvet under which I was intending to snug down for the long haul.
- Maxine stirred, yawned, rolling over and snugging up against me, her breasts pressing against my side and an arm draped over my chest.
- I woke late the next morning snugged warmly in Scott's bed… without Scott.
Phrases
snug as a bug (in a rug)
Derivatives
snugness
- I've been having some frighteningly faultless sleep recently - a rare fusion of pleasant dreams, the all over body relaxation you normally only get after a long bath the night before and a general feeling of snugness as I wake.
- I've now discovered that they fit perfectly again without the slightest feeling of snugness.
- The results fit with quite incredible snugness.
Origin
Late 16th century (originally in nautical use in the sense 'shipshape, compact, prepared for bad weather'): probably of Low German or Dutch origin.
The first use of snug was as a sailors' term, probably from German or Dutch, that meant ‘shipshape, properly prepared for bad weather’: ‘Captain Read…ordered the Carpenters to cut down our Quarter Deck to make the Ship snug and the fitter for Sailing’ (William Dampier, A New Voyage Around the World, 1697). A small, comfortable room in a pub was known as a snug from the 1830s, but the original name was a snuggery—in The Pickwick Papers (1837) Charles Dickens refers to ‘the snuggery inside the bar’. There used to be a verb snug that meant ‘to lie or nestle closely’, and from this we get snuggle (late 17th century).