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Snob originally meant "shoemaker" (a sense that survives in places). Cambridge University students of the late 18th century adopted it as a slang term for a "townsman, somebody not a member of the university," and it seems to have been this usage that formed the basis in the 1830s for the emergence of a new general sense "member of the lower classes." The modern sense "somebody who admires and cultivates social superiors" received a considerable boost when Thackeray used it in his Book of Snobs (1848). As for the origins of the word itself, the suggestion that it comes from s.nob., short for Latin sine nobilitate "without nobility," is ingenious but ignores the word's early history.
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