Also 9 Sc. snab. [Orig. slang, of obscure origin.]
1. dial. or colloq. A shoemaker or cobbler; a cobbler’s apprentice.
α. 1781. in Hone, Every-day Bk., II. 837. Sir William Blase, a snob by trade.
1785. Grose, Dict. Vulgar T., Snob, a nick name for a shoemaker.
1819. Sporting Mag., IV. 249. Tom Jenkins was known as a cobbler or snob.
1824. W. E. Andrews, Rev. Fox’s Bk. Mart., I. 252. Both Snip and Snob were burned for their pains.
1880. Fraser’s Mag., Nov., 642. And even among the snobs the custom of the trade is against giving credit.
β. 1808. Jamieson, Snab, a cant term for a … cobler’s boy.
1813. Picken, Poems, II. 132. To flame as an author our Snab was sae bent.
1828. Moir, Mansie Wauch, xiv. Rory Skirl, the snab, and Geordie Thump, the dyer.
1896. W. Harvey, Kenneth-crook, 38 (E.D.D.). He had entered the craft in the usual way by being what the villagers called a ‘snab.’
† 2. Cambridge slang. Any one not a gownsman; a townsman. Obs. (Cf. CAD2 4.)
c. 1796. in C. Whibley, In Cap & Gown (1889), 87. Snobs call him Nicholson! Plebeian name.
1828. Sporting Mag., XXI. 428/2. A capital front rank of ‘tassells,’ thrust on by hundreds more, all eager for a ‘slap at a snob.’
1865. Sat. Rev., Sept., 298/2. Happily the annals of Oxford present no instance of a ‘snob’ murdered in the streets.
3. A person belonging to the ordinary or lower classes of society: one having no pretensions to rank or gentility.
1832. Essex Standard, 31 March, 4/1. The nobs have lost their seats of old, and honest snobs have got ’em.
1834. W. H. Brookfield, in F. M. Brookfield, Cambridge ‘Apostles’ (1906), iv. 66. Snobs go early [to the Grand Opera, Paris], buy pit tickets…, and beset comers at a quarter past seven to give them 51/2 francs for their tickets.
1841. J. T. Hewlett, Parish Clerk, III. 165. In the presence of a tail of snobs who accompanied him on his way.
1852. Earp, Gold Col. Australia, 9. The majority of the colonists are essentially snobs, and they are justly proud of the distinction.
b. One who has little or no breeding or good taste; a vulgar or ostentatious person.
1831. Mrs. Sherwood, Henry Milner, III. ix. 175–6. He is a genteel young man—no snob—quite the gentleman.
1843. Thackeray, Irish Sk. Bk., Wks. 1879, XVIII. 111. A vulgar man in England … chiefly displays his character of snob by … swaggering and showing off in his coarse dull stupid way.
1859. Slang Dict., 97. Snob, a low, vulgar, or affected person.
c. One who meanly or vulgarly admires and seeks to imitate, or associate with, those of superior rank or wealth; one who wishes to be regarded as a person of social importance.
1848. Thackeray, Bk. Snobs, i. I mean by positive [Snobs], such persons as are Snobs everywhere,… being by nature endowed with Snobbishness.
1860. H. Mayhew, Upper Rhine, iv. i. 183. So necessary … are the professional titles considered by the supreme Snob of an authority from whom we quote.
1863. Miss Braddon, J. Marchmont’s Legacy, I. ii. 42. ‘What a snob I am,’ he thought; ‘always bragging of home.’
1882. Mrs. Riddell, Pr. Wales’s Garden-Party, 127. He was … such a snob, he felt pleased his clerks should hear a butler ask for a situation.
4. = BLACK-LEG 3.
1839. De Quincey, Tait’s Mag., VI. 459/1 (Webster). Those who work for lower wages during a strike are called snobs, the men who stand out being nobs.
5. attrib., as snob ambition, -land, nature, ore; snob-stick, = sense 4 (cf. KNOBSTICK 2).
Other examples occur in Thackeray’s Book of Snobs.
1848. Thackeray, Bk. Snobs, Pref. It is Beautiful … to sink shafts in society and come upon rich veins of Snob-ore. Ibid., xxxii. O you pride of all Snobland! O you crawling, truckling … lacqueys and parasites!
1860. Slang Dict., 221. Snob-stick, a workman who refuses to join in strikes, or trade unions.
1866. Carlyle, Remin. (1881), II. 189. What of snob ambition there might be in me.
1883. S. Pearson, in Congregationalist, May, 377. The snob nature comes out in strange ways.
