It's the Word of the Day podcast for November 20.
Today's word is SNIVEL, spelled S-N-I-V-E-L.
SNIVEL is a verb.
To SNIVEL is to speak or act in a whining, sniffling, tearful, or weakly emotional manner.
The word snivel may also be used to mean to run at the nose,
to snuffle, or to cry or whine with snuffling.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina.
At first he ran a highway stop with video gambling.
To sit and do nothing for 10 to 12 hours drove me nuts, he said.
That's when he found art.
I started making little faces, and they were selling so fast,
I'll put pants and shirts on these guys," he said, referring to his hand-carved sculptures.
Then people wind and sniffled and wanted bears, so I started carving some bears.
There's never been anything pretty about sniffling.
The word snivel, which originally meant simply to have a runny nose,
has an old English ancestor whose probable form was snifflon.
Its lineage includes some other charming words of yore, an Old English word for mucus snuffle,
the Middle Dutch word for a head-cold snuff,
the Old Norse word for snout, which is snutba, and naan, a Greek verb meaning to flow.
Nowadays, we mostly use snivel, as we have since the 1600s,