Trending: ‘snitty’

Lookups spiked 150,000% on May 1, 2019

Why are people looking up snitty?

Snitty stomped its feet all the way to the top of our lookups on May 1st, 2019, after Attorney General William Barr said that he found a letter sent by Robert Mueller III merited this descriptor.

Barr dismisses Mueller’s letter complaining about his summary of the report conclusions. “The letter’s a bit snitty,” Barr says.
— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) May 1, 2019

What does snitty mean?

We define snitty as “disagreeably ill-tempered.” It should not be confused with lungeous (“ill-tempered; rough and violent”) or purdy (“disagreeably self-important”).

Where does snitty come from?

The origin of snitty is somewhat unclear, although there may be a connection with snit (“a state of agitation”). The shorter word has been in use since the 1930s, while snitty entered common parlance in the 1970s.

Citations

He decided to cast her in The Last Picture Show as Jacy, a spoiled, snitty, small town high school heartbreaker.
— Lloyd Shearer, The Hartford Courant (Hartford, CT), 16 Jul. 1972

Trend Watch is a data-driven report on words people are looking up at much higher search rates than normal. While most trends can be traced back to the news or popular culture, our focus is on the lookup data rather than the events themselves.