snow

English snow comes from Middle English snaw/snow, from Old English snāw, tracing back through Proto-West Germanic *snaiw and Proto-Germanic *snaiwaz to the Proto-Indo-European root *snóygʷʰos, itself from a verb root meaning "to snow."

The noun gave rise to a verb, snouen, formed by adding the infinitive suffix -en to the noun — this displaced the older native verb snīwan (which survives only as the obsolete "snew"). Later, one figurative sense of the verb — "to hoodwink someone" — likely grew from the image of a person blinded or confused by a storm; separately, an adjective use of the word arose from the phrase "a snowball's chance in hell," describing something with no chance at all.

The word has a wide family of cognates across the Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, and Slavic branches — German Schnee, Swedish snö, Russian снег (sneg), and Irish sneachta all descend from the same ancient root, showing just how deeply this word for winter's whiteness is woven into the Indo-European family tree.