[f. SNIP v. + -ET.] A small piece cut off; a small fragment or portion.
1664. Butler, Hud., II. iii. 824. Witches Simpling, and on Gibbets Cutting from Malefactors snippets.
1862. Sala, Seven Sons, III. 272. [She] used to cut her dress into snippets with a pair of scissors.
1885. Lady Brassey, In the Trades, 120. The droll little heaps, and dabs, and snippets in which everything was sold.
1897. F. Thompson, New Poems, 135. Snippets and waste From old ancestral wearings.
attrib. 1909. Nation, 30 Oct., 191/1. One of them [leaves] bears the tell-tale snippet-mark of a leaf-cutter bee.
b. In transf. or fig. uses.
1880. Sat. Rev., 2 Oct., 438/1. The mere sticking on to his dialogue of snippets from Elizabethan phraseology is a vain thing.
1882. F. Harrison, Choice of Bks., etc. (1886), 296. The love of beauty is no thing of dilettantism to be cut into snippets and shreds.
1885. Stevenson, Prince Otto, II. iv. 105. That is a poor snippet of malicious gossip.
c. spec. A short passage taken from a literary work; a short scrap of literary matter of any kind.
1864. Spectator, 12 March, 284/2. We can point to at least three highly respectable provincials which week by week give these paragraphs and snippets from the Saturday Review as their own leaders. Ibid. (1884), 4 Oct., 1309/2. It is the latest stamp of the true ‘classic’ to be cut up into snippets for a birthday-book.
1897. Month, Oct., 435. The text is in fact largely made up of a kind of patchwork of snippets which often amalgamate ill.
attrib. 1899. Daily News, 5 July, 8/2. He … reads nothing but sporting papers and ‘snippet weeklies.’
