different between eat vs snarf

English

Etymology

From Middle English eten, from Old English etan (“to eat”), from Proto-West Germanic *etan, from Proto-Germanic *etan? (“to eat”), from Proto-Indo-European *h?édti, from *h?ed- (“to eat”).

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /i?t/
• (US) IPA^(key): /it/
• Rhymes: -i?t

Verb

eat (third-person singular simple present eats, present participle eating, simple past ate or (dialectal) et or (obsolete) eat, past participle eaten or (dialectal) etten)

1. To ingest; to be ingested.
   1. (transitive, intransitive) To consume (something solid or semi-solid, usually food) by putting it into the mouth and swallowing it.
      • At twilight in the summer there is never anybody to fear—man, woman, or cat—in the chambers and at that hour the mice come out. They do not eat parchment or foolscap or red tape, but they eat the luncheon crumbs.
   3. (intransitive) To consume a meal.
      • 2016, VOA Learning English (public domain)

        I eat in the kitchen.

   4. (intransitive, ergative) To be eaten.
      • 1852, The New Monthly Magazine (page 310)

        I don't know any quarter in England where you get such undeniable mutton—mutton that eats like mutton, instead of the nasty watery, stringy, turnipy stuff, neither mutton nor lamb, that other countries are inundated with.

      • 1863, Sheridan Le Fanu, The House by the Churchyard

        […] dish him [the fish] with slices of oranges, barberries, grapes, gooseberries, and butter; and you will find that he eats deliriously either with farced pain or gammon pain.

   5. (copulative, intransitive) To have a particular quality of diet; to be well-fed or underfed (typically as "eat healthy" or "eat good").
2. To use up.
   1. (transitive) To destroy, consume, or use up.
      • 1857-1859, William Makepeace Thackeray, The Virginians

        His wretched estate is eaten up with mortgages.

   2. (transitive, informal, of a device) To damage, destroy, or fail to eject a removable part or an inserted object.
      • 1991, Shane Black, The Last Boy Scout (movie)

        No! There's a problem with the cassette player. Don't press fast forward or it eats the tape!

   3. (transitive, informal, of a vending machine or similar device) To consume money (or other instruments of value, such as a token) deposited or inserted by a user, while failing to either provide the intended product or service, or return the payment.
      • 1977, Nancy Dowd, Slap Shot (movie)

        Hey! This stupid [soda vending] machine ate my quarter.

3. (transitive, informal) To cause (someone) to worry.

4. (transitive, business) To take the loss in a transaction.
   • 1988, George Gallo, Midnight Run (movie)

     I have to have him in court tomorrow, if he doesn't show up, I forfeit the bond and I have to eat the $300,000.
5. (transitive, slang) To be injured or killed by (something such as a firearm or its projectile), especially in the mouth.
   • 1944, William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, The Big Sleep (screenplay)

     I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops and Eddie Mars' gang. I dodge bullets and eat saps.

   • 1997, A. A. Gill, "Diary" (in The Spectator, 1 November 1997):

     Friends are only necessary in the ghastly country, where you have to have them, along with rubber boots and a barometer and secateurs, to put off bucolic idiocy, a wet brain, or eating the 12-bore.

   • 2012, Kaya McLaren, How I Came to Sparkle Again: A Novel, St. Martin's Press (?ISBN):

     Mike had been to other calls where someone had eaten a gun. He knew to expect teeth embedded in the ceiling and brains dripping off it.

   • 2017, Edward W. Robertson, Stardust, Edward W. Robertson:

     The animal was sweating and scared and MacAdams was surprised when they finished up without either of them eating a kick.

   • 2018, Daniel Tomazic, Of Bullies and Men: Young Adult Fiction (?ISBN), page 18:

     There was a resounding smacking noise and Georgy was sure Philip had just eaten a fist.

6. (transitive, intransitive) To corrode or erode.

7. (transitive, slang) To perform oral sex (on a person or body part).

Conjugation

Synonyms

• (consume): consume, swallow; see also Thesaurus:eat
• (cause to worry): bother, disturb, worry
• (eat a meal): dine, breakfast, chow down, feed one's face, have one's breakfast/lunch/dinner/supper/tea, lunch

Derived terms

Related terms

• fret
• ort

Translations

See also

• drink
• edible
• food

Noun

eat (plural eats)

1. (colloquial) Something to be eaten; a meal; a food item.
   • 2011, William Chitty, ?Nigel Barker, ?Michael Valos, Integrated Marketing Communications (page 167)

     Eating a Picnic creates a flurry of wafer pieces, flying peanuts and chocolate crumbs. […] As well as being messy, Picnic happens to be a big eat – something of a consumption challenge in fact.

Anagrams

• -ate, AET, Até, Atë, ETA, TEA, Tea, a.e.t., aet, ate, eta, tea, æt.

Latin

Pronunciation

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /?e.at/, [?eät?]
• (Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /?e.at/, [????t?]

Verb

eat

1. third-person singular present active subjunctive of e?

Northern Sami

Pronunciation

• (Kautokeino) IPA^(key): /?ea?h(t)/

Verb

eat

1. first-person plural present of ii

West Frisian

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /???t/

Pronoun

eat

1. something, anything

   Antonym: neat

Further reading

• “eat”, in Wurdboek fan de Fryske taal (in Dutch), 2011

English

Etymology

Blend of snort +? scarf?

Pronunciation

Verb

snarf (third-person singular simple present snarfs, present participle snarfing, simple past and past participle snarfed)

1. (transitive, slang) To eat or consume greedily.

   He snarfed a whole bag of chips in a couple of minutes!

   • 1999: Marya Hornbacker, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, page 239

     Freed from the usual inhibitions, we get home and I snarf down pasta salad right out of the Tupperware container […]

   • 2000: Nancy Woodruff, Someone Else's Child, page 40

     "I'm not going to sit there while you two watch me snarf a whole pie by myself."

   • 2003: Allen D. Berrien, Powerboat Care and Repair: How to Keep Your Outboard, Sterndrive, Or Gas-Inboard Boat Alive and Well, page 41

     The old 40-horse models used to snarf up more fuel than today's 90-horse models.

2. (transitive, slang) To take something by dubious means, but without the connotations of stealing; to take something without regard to etiquette.

   I snarfed a bunch of freebies from the vendor's booth when he wasn't looking.

   • 1995: Tom Shanley, Don Anderson, ISA System Architecture, page 296

     Either write-through or write-back policy caches may snarf the data that the bus master is writing to memory.

   • 1996: Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, page 399

     ...in addition, the embedding enables the designer to snarf features from the underlying language […]

   • 2001: Brad A. Myers, Choon Hong Peck, Jeffrey Nicols, Dave Kong, and Robert Miller, Interacting at a Distance Using Semantic Snarfing, in Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pages 305-314.

     Other future applications of the semantic snarfing idea might include classrooms, where students might snarf interesting pieces of content from the instructor's presentation; […]

3. (transitive, intransitive, slang) To expel (fluid or food) through the mouth or nostrils accidentally, usually while attempting to stifle laughter with one's mouth full.

   It was so funny, I snarfed my milk onto my keyboard.

4. (transitive, slang, computing) To slurp (computing slang sense); to load in entirety; to copy as a whole.

   I snarfed the whole database into my program.

Anagrams

• FRANs