snowball
Part of speech: noun
adj
verb
Morphological type: compound
Topics: lifestyle
sex
sexuality
Etymology: From Middle English snoweball, snoweballe, snaweballe, snayballe, equivalent to snow + ball. Cognate with Scots snawbaw, German Schneeball, Luxembourgish Schnéiball, Dutch sneeuwbal, Afrikaans sneeubal, Limburgish snieëbal, West Frisian sniebal, Saterland Frisian Sneebaal, Sneebal, Swedish snöboll, Elfdalian sniųoboll, Danish snebold, Norwegian Bokmål snøball, Norwegian Nynorsk snøball and Icelandic snjóbolti.
Compound parts: snow
ball
Inflected forms:
form: snowballs
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: snowballs
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: snowballing
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: snowballed
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: snowballed
pos: verb
tags: past
Senses:
gloss: A ball of snow, usually one made in the hand and thrown for amusement in a snowball fight; also a larger ball of snow made by rolling a snowball around in snow that sticks to it and increases its diameter.
pos: noun
gloss: A cocktail made from lemonade and advocaat.
pos: noun
gloss: Something that snowballs (grows rapidly out of control).
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
examples: Representatives of the small airlines that felt betrayed by Brown's policy started a political snowball rolling, resulting in the Airmail Act of 1934...
gloss: A sex act involving passing ejaculated semen from one person's mouth to another's.
pos: noun
gloss: A type of ice dessert: a snow cone.
pos: noun
tags: US
gloss: A small cake, typically cream-filled and covered in chocolate icing and desiccated coconut.
pos: noun
examples: It didn't take long to eat a packetful of snowballs — they are simply delicious.
gloss: Of something with rapid growth, often uncontrolled. Compare snowball effect.
pos: adj
tags: not-comparable
examples: Scandal, with her, did not lose any of its usual snowball propensities, of gathering as it went.
gloss: To rapidly grow out of proportion or control, from an initially smaller state.
pos: verb
tags: figuratively
intransitive
examples: The high unemployment rates quickly snowballed into a major budget problem for the government.
There's a further knock-on effect from cancelling trains. It's not unusual for train crew diagrams to include a period 'on the cushions', travelling as a passenger to get staff from one train to the next. Cancel this train and it's likely the crew won't reach their next train, so this too is cancelled. Disruption snowballs and diagrams become harder to deliver.
gloss: To play at throwing snowballs.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
gloss: To pelt with snowballs; to throw snowballs at.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
gloss: To receive ejaculated semen in one's mouth, and to then pass it back and forth between one’s mouth and another person’s mouth.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
slang
vulgar
Derived words: cast snowballs
Chinese snowball
coconut snowball
custom snowball
dirty snowball
Mexican snowball
New York snowball
snowball bush
snowball cactus
Snowball Earth
snowball effect
snowballer
snowball fight
snowball hammer
snowball in hell
snowball marches
snowball opacity
snowball prime
snowball sample
snowball sampling
snowball's chance
snowball's chance in an oven
snowball's chance in hell
snowball tree
snowball’s chance in hell
snowballing
Translations: