Snudge

Part of speech: noun, verb

Definitions

1. To settle comfortably close to someone or something for warmth and shelter ; to live in a stingy, penny-pinching way and hoard what little one has
2. To cuddle up snugly in a cosy spot ; to economize harshly and begrudge spending even small sums of money
3. To lie close and sheltered for comfort ; to scrimp and save meanly, avoiding any expense whenever possible

Etymology: The man who "snudges" in George Herbert's poem is not cosy. In "Giddinesse," published in "The Temple" in 1633, Herbert describes a restless soul who is "some twentie sev'rall men at least / Each sev'rall houre": one moment he "will fight it out, and to the warres," the next he will "eat his bread in peace, / And snudge in quiet." Lying low and keeping close is a mood that changes by the hour, and it carries a whiff of retreat. That whiff comes from the word's company. Alongside the verb, early modern English had a noun of the same form meaning a miser, a grasping, sneaking sort of person who hoards and keeps to himself. It may have grown out of the verb. If so, the idea of drawing in and hunkering down was turned on character: the man who curls up around his own comforts becomes the man who curls up around his money. Where either came from is unknown. The obvious suspect is "snug," which shares its sound and its sense of being tucked tight, and the two may be related. But "snug" has murky origins of its own, so the resemblance cannot be traced back to a common source. Samuel Johnson put the verb in his Dictionary of 1755, defining it as to lie idle, close, or snug, and citing Herbert's line as his authority. After that it slipped out of the standard language and survived mainly in dialect. There it came to mean simply nestling down out of the cold, with the miser long forgotten.

Synonyms: miser, skinflint, niggard, scrooge, hoarder

Antonyms: spendthrift, philanthropist, squanderer