Another Irregular Verb Sneaks Into Regular Usage

When I think the word “snuck” I always think of Huck Finn, partly because the word rhymes with “Huck” and partly because he did so much sneaking around.

But I was surprised to find that “snuck” actually never occurs in the text of Twain’s novel though “sneaked” does.

From Chapter 30 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

So the king sneaked into the wigwam and took to his bottle for comfort, and before long the duke tackled his bottle; and so in about a half an hour they was as thick as thieves again, and the tighter they got the lovinger they got, and went off a-snoring in each other's arms. 

From Chapter 30 of Tom Sawyer, Huck speaking:

I wanted to see what was up—they sneaked along so. 

I’m not the only one that misremembers Twain: sayings are often attributed to him that he actually never uttered.

“Snuck” used to be considered slangy and there is a report of an early word processor rejecting as a “non-word,” but it has largely replaced “sneaked” even in the vocabulary of sophisticated speakers. I hear it used frequently by National Public Radio reporters. Although I still recommend “sneaked” in formal contexts and most dictionaries label the other spelling “informal” it will rarely cause raised eyebrows.

The results of a quick-and-dirty Google search:

sneaked:  1,170,000 hits
snuck:      2,540,000 hits 

In Google Books:

sneaked: 752,000 hits
snuck:     401,000 hits

Of course Google Books contains many more older texts, so it’s biased toward “sneaked,” but “snuck” still makes an impressive showing.

Most of the time words which have changed their spelling in the past tense from irregular (“strong”) forms to regular (“weak”) ones ending in “-ed.” Since the Anglo-Saxon period the number of strong verbs has shrunk by two-thirds. “Holpen” became “helped,” “raught” became “reached,” and “swole” became “swelled.”

But there are other exceptions to this pattern: “digged” became “dug,” “dived” has largely been replaced by “dove,”  and “stringed” became “strung.”

I was helped in researching this topic by an excellent discussion of “sneaked” vs. “snuck” on the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange.