Snitch
noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A thief. slang
- 2 someone acting as an informer or decoy for the police wordnet
- 3 An informer, one who betrays their group. slang
- 4 A nose. British, slang
"'Yah, I wouldn't git a second-'and dress at a pawnbroker's!' 'Garn!' said Liza indignantly. 'I'll swipe yer over the snitch if yer talk ter me. [...] ""
- 5 A tiny morsel.
""He pays for the food you eat," said the woman. "Yeah," said the boy. "And I earn every snitch doing everything ever gets done around here.""
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- 6 A ball used in the sport of Quidditch: the Golden Snitch.
- 1 To inform on someone, especially in betrayal of others. intransitive, slang
- 2 give away information about somebody wordnet
- 3 To contact or cooperate with the police for any reason. intransitive, slang
- 4 take by theft wordnet
- 5 To steal, quickly and quietly. dated, slang, transitive
"Besides, I shall require your help in snitching the pig. But I was forgetting. You are not abreast of that side of our activities, are you? Emsworth has a pig. The Duke wants it."
Example
More examples"You don't do a useful snitch of work."
Etymology
Origin uncertain. Perhaps an alteration of Middle English snacche (“a trap, snare”), snacchen (“to seize (prey)”, whence modern English snatch). Compare also Middle English snik snak (“a sudden blow, snap”). Alternatively, perhaps from a dialectal variant of sneak, from Middle English sniken, from Old English snīcan (“to creep; crawl”). More at sneak.
Related phrases
More for "snitch"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.