Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To cut, clip, or separate (something) with short, quick strokes.
  • intransitive verb To cut or clip with short, quick strokes.
  • noun An instance of snipping or the sound produced by snipping.
  • noun A small cut made with scissors or shears.
  • noun A small piece cut or clipped off.
  • noun A bit or scrap.
  • noun One that is small or slight in size or stature.
  • noun A person regarded as impertinent or mischievous.
  • noun Hand shears used in cutting sheet metal.
  • noun Slang Something easily accomplished.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To cut off at one light, quick stroke with shears or scissors; clip; cut off in any way: frequently with off.
  • To steal by snipping.
  • To make by snipping or cutting: as, to snip a hole in one's coat.
  • To move or work lightly; make signs with, as the fingers.
  • To make a short, quick cut or clip; cut out a bit; clip: sometimes with at for the attempt to cut.
  • noun A clip; a single cut with shears or scissors; hence, any similar act of cutting.
  • noun A small piece cut off; a shred; a bit.
  • noun A share; a snack. See to go snips, below.
  • noun A tailor.
  • noun A small, insignificant person or thing: as, a mere snip of a girl.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To cut off the nip or neb of, or to cut off at once with shears or scissors; to clip off suddenly; to nip; hence, to break off; to snatch away.
  • noun A single cut, as with shears or scissors; a clip.
  • noun A small shred; a bit cut off.
  • noun obsolete A share; a snack.
  • noun Slang A tailor.
  • noun Small hand shears for cutting sheet metal.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb To cut with short sharp actions, as with scissors.
  • verb To reduce the price of a product, to create a snip.
  • verb informal To circumcise.
  • noun The act of snipping; cutting a small amount off of something.
  • noun Something acquired for a low price; a bargain.
  • noun A small amount of something; a pinch.
  • noun definite, euphemistic A vasectomy.
  • noun A small or weak person, especially a young one.
  • noun obsolete A share or portion; a snack.
  • noun obsolete, slang A tailor.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a small piece of anything (especially a piece that has been snipped off)
  • verb sever or remove by pinching or snipping
  • noun the act of clipping or snipping
  • verb cultivate, tend, and cut back the growth of

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Dutch or Low German snippen.]

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Examples

  • She snipped three roses with astonishing swiftness, -- _snip, snip, snip_!

    If Winter Comes 1925

  • And here's a snip from the aforementioned HuffPo piece by Sam Stein:

    Boing Boing 2009

  • Here is a snip from the part devoted to shock auteur Jim Powers:

    Boing Boing 2009

  • Here's a snip from a news article that describes her with the derogatory term "hermaphrodite":

    Boing Boing 2009

  • Here's a snip from a feature in New York Magazine about freaked-out workers on Wall Street who gazed into the abyss with a closer view than the rest of us, and made survival plans:

    Boing Boing 2009

  • Over here the snip is pretty much only done for religious reasons.

    The First Cut | Her Bad Mother 2009

  • And snip from a related article by Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides on Wired News:

    Boing Boing 2008

  • Just spotted on Twitter (search: mumbai or #mumbai) and via chat sessions here in the Boing Boing tv studio: Attacks in Bombay (NYT), and here's a snip from the Times of India report:

    Boing Boing 2008

  • Here's a snip from the latest post on Kevin Kelly's Technium blog:

    Boing Boing 2008

  • Over at NYT finance correspondent Floyd Norris 'excellent blog, a snip from a terrifying report out today from The Levy Forecasting Center at Bard College.

    Boing Boing 2008

Comments

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  • A modest villa up a hundred rough steps overlooking the little harbour town of Konia, an off-season short-notice snip at 1,200 euros a week. From "The Last Werewolf" by Glen Duncan.

    March 19, 2012

  • If your genome Is all 6 billion DNA base pairs (the function of most of which we don't understand), and your exome is the 20,000+ genes (about 60 million base pairs) that code for protein, then your variome is a smaller subset still: it is an assortment of markers more or less evenly spaced across the genome that tend to vary from person to person; some markers fall within genes, but most do not. By early 2010 researchers had identified nearly 13 million of these markers; . . . . These marker sets (called single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNPs—"snips") were thought to capture much of the variation in human DNA, although they represented no more than 0.05 percent of the entire genome.
    Misha Angrist, Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), ch. 4 (Kindle loc. 1000)

    December 17, 2016