The way snack found its way into English is a long story. Most likely it comes from Dutch snacken which describes a dog snapping or biting. The earliest reference goes back to around 1230 and relates to a dog in hell which is so intimidated that it fears to snack (snecchen). In a translation of Latin fables that came out in English in the 1530s, there is a story about a fish party with the coolest fish trying to outdo each other. It ends with all the fish fighting each other and a scene in which “every one of them began to snack at each other and would have torn each other into small pieces”. This use of snack as a word that means barking at a person still exists today.
The idea of biting and managing to get a piece of the action came next. Snack came to mean a part or a portion of something. A nice example is in Farquhar’s play Sir Harry Wildair when there is talk about dividing up the spoils of a conquest. “Tis about a thousand pound. We go snacks”. The response is immediate. “For what? Why snack madame” and the marquis proposes a much lower amount as the snack.
And after snack was used to refer to a small share of something, came snack as a taste of liquor and then as a small portion of food. Appropriately enough the word was first used by an Englishman in America. John Dunton was a successful bookseller who also sold books when visiting New England for a year. Of course he wrote letters back home. In 1685 he commented, “As he was sure to supply us with drink even without asking, so he would always thrust himself in for a snack in helping to drink it.” The first real snack was a liquid lunch. Over the next 100 years, snack was used to mean part of lunch, or part of dinner and then came into its own as a small meal in its own right.
