snippet
(ˈsnɪpɪt)
[f. snip v. + -et1.]
A small piece cut off; a small fragment or portion.
| 1664 Butler Hud. ii. iii. 824 Witches Simpling, and on Gibbets Cutting from Malefactors snippets. 1862 Sala Seven Sons III. 272 [She] used to cut her dress into snippets with a pair of scissors. 1885 A. Brassey In the Trades 120 The droll little heaps, and dabs, and snippets in which everything was sold. 1897 F. Thompson New Poems 135 Snippets and waste From old ancestral wearings. |
| attrib. 1909 Nation 30 Oct. 191/1 One of them bears the tell-tale snippet-mark of a leaf-cutter bee. |
b. In
transf. or
fig. uses.
| 1880 Sat. Rev. 2 Oct. 438/1 The mere sticking on to his dialogue of snippets from Elizabethan phraseology is a vain thing. 1882 F. Harrison Choice of Books (1886) 296 The love of beauty is nothing of dilettantism to be cut into snippets and shreds. 1886 Stevenson Prince Otto ii. iv, That is a poor snippet of malicious gossip. |
c. spec. A short passage taken from a literary work; a short scrap of literary matter of any kind.
| 1864 Spectator 12 Mar., These paragraphs and snippets from the Saturday Review. 1884 Ibid. 4 Oct. 1309/2 It is the latest stamp of the true ‘classic’ to be cut up into snippets for a birthday-book. 1897 Month Oct. 435 The text is in fact largely made up of a kind of patchwork of snippets which often amalgamate ill. |
| attrib. 1899 Daily News 5 July 8/2 He..reads nothing but sporting papers and ‘snippet weeklies’. |