[syn: hang-up, hitch, rub, snag]
VERB (3)
1. catch on a snag;
- Example: "I snagged my stocking"
2. get by acting quickly and smartly;
- Example: "snag a bargain"
3. hew jaggedly;
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
Snag \Snag\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Snagged; p. pr. & vb. n.
Snagging.]
1. To cut the snags or branches from, as the stem of a tree;
to hew roughly. [Prov. Eng.] --Halliwell.
[1913 Webster]
2. To injure or destroy, as a steamboat or other vessel, by a
snag, or projecting part of a sunken tree. [U. S.]
[1913 Webster]
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
Snag \Snag\, n. [Prov. E., n., a lump on a tree where a branch
has been cut off; v., to cut off the twigs and small branches
from a tree, of Celtic origin; cf. Gael. snaigh, snaidh, to
cut down, to prune, to sharpen, p. p. snaighte, snaidhte, cut
off, lopped, Ir. snaigh a hewing, cutting.]
1. A stump or base of a branch that has been lopped off; a
short branch, or a sharp or rough branch; a knot; a
protuberance.
[1913 Webster]
The coat of arms
Now on a naked snag in triumph borne. --Dryden.
[1913 Webster]
2. A tooth projecting beyond the rest; contemptuously, a
broken or decayed tooth. --Prior.
[1913 Webster]
3. A tree, or a branch of a tree, fixed in the bottom of a
river or other navigable water, and rising nearly or quite
to the surface, by which boats are sometimes pierced and
sunk.
[1913 Webster]
4. (Zool.) One of the secondary branches of an antler.
[1913 Webster]
[1913 Webster]
Snag boat, a steamboat fitted with apparatus for removing
snags and other obstructions in navigable streams. [U.S.]
Snag tooth. Same as Snag, 2.
[1913 Webster]
How thy snag teeth stand orderly,
Like stakes which strut by the water side. --J.
Cotgrave.
[1913 Webster]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
snag
n 1: a sharp protuberance
2: a dead tree that is still standing, usually in an undisturbed
forest; "a snag can provide food and a habitat for insects
and birds"
3: an opening made forcibly as by pulling apart; "there was a
rip in his pants"; "she had snags in her stockings" [syn:
rip, rent, snag, split, tear]
4: an unforeseen obstacle [syn: hang-up, hitch, rub,
snag]
v 1: catch on a snag; "I snagged my stocking"
2: get by acting quickly and smartly; "snag a bargain"
3: hew jaggedly
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0:
156 Moby Thesaurus words for "snag":
baby tooth, bag, bar, bicuspid, blemish, block, blockade,
bottleneck, brake, bucktooth, bug, canine, catch, clog, cog, comb,
complication, coral heads, cordon, crack, crag, crimp, crown, crux,
curb, curtain, cuspid, cutter, deciduous tooth, defect, defection,
deficiency, dent, denticle, denticulation, dentil, dentition,
determent, deterrent, difficulty, dogtooth, drag, drawback, enmesh,
ensnare, entangle, entrap, eyetooth, failing, failure, fang, fault,
faute, flaw, foible, fore tooth, foul, frailty, gagtooth,
gang tooth, gold tooth, grinder, hamper, hang-up, harpoon, harrow,
hazard, hindrance, hitch, hold-up, hole, hook, hurdle, impediment,
imperfection, inadequacy, incisor, infirmity, ironbound coast, jag,
joker, kink, land, lasso, ledges, lee shore, little problem, mesh,
milk tooth, molar, nail, net, noose, objection, obstacle,
obstruction, obstructive, one small difficulty, peak, pecten, peg,
permanent tooth, pinch, pitfall, pivot tooth, premolar, problem,
projection, quicksands, rake, ratchet, rift, rip, rockbound coast,
rocks, rope, rub, sack, sandbank, sandbar, sands, sawtooth,
scrivello, shallows, shoals, shortcoming, snaggle, snaggletooth,
snare, sniggle, something missing, spear, spire, sprocket, spur,
steeple, stricture, stumbling block, stumbling stone, taint, take,
tangle, tangle up with, tear, tooth, trap, traverse, tush, tusk,
undercurrent, undertow, vulnerable place, weak link, weak point,
weakness, wisdom tooth
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):
bug
bugs
defect
snag
An unwanted and unintended property of a
program or piece of hardware, especially one that causes
it to malfunction. Antonym of feature. E.g. "There's a bug
in the editor: it writes things out backward." The
identification and removal of bugs in a program is called
"debugging".
Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better
known for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a
technician solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II machine
by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of
one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated bug in
its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she
was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened).
For many years the logbook associated with the incident and
the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at
the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The entire story,
with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is
recorded in the "Annals of the History of Computing", Vol. 3,
No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286.
The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads
"1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of
bug being found". This wording establishes that the term was
already in use at the time in its current specific sense - and
Hopper herself reports that the term "bug" was regularly
applied to problems in radar electronics during WWII.
Indeed, the use of "bug" to mean an industrial defect was
already established in Thomas Edison's time, and a more
specific and rather modern use can be found in an electrical
handbook from 1896 ("Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity",
Theo. Audel & Co.) which says: "The term "bug" is used to a
limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the
connections or working of electric apparatus." It further
notes that the term is "said to have originated in
quadruplex telegraphy and have been transferred to all
electric apparatus."
The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of
the term; that it came from telephone company usage, in which
"bugs in a telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines.
Though this derivation seems to be mistaken, it may well be a
distorted memory of a joke first current among *telegraph*
operators more than a century ago!
Actually, use of "bug" in the general sense of a disruptive
event goes back to Shakespeare! In the first edition of
Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of "bug" is "A
frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to
"bugbear", a Welsh term for a variety of mythological monster
which (to complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced
into the popular lexicon through fantasy role-playing games.
In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to
insects. Here is a plausible conversation that never actually
happened:
"There is a bug in this ant farm!"
"What do you mean? I don't see any ants in it."
"That's the bug."
[There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was
moved to the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry
so asserted. A correspondent who thought to check discovered
that the bug was not there. While investigating this in late
1990, your editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug,
but had unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept
it - and that the present curator of their History of
American Technology Museum didn't know this and agreed that it
would make a worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the
Smithsonian in mid-1991, but due to space and money
constraints has not yet been exhibited. Thus, the process of
investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in an
entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true! - ESR]
[Jargon File]
(1999-06-29)