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Today one of our daughters mentioned something about sneaking around. Technically she said the word snuck, which was followed up by a correction… “The proper word is sneaked.”

This little exchange (fairly typically in the Polen household) caused me to ask, “When is it appropriate to use the word snuck, and when is it appropriate to use the word sneaked?”

The answer I received was, “Snuck is not a real word. So the appropriate word is always sneaked.”

Really?!

Hmm.

I decided to look it up. (Another fairly typical activity in the Polen household.)

What I found was super interesting.

Apparently snuck was not a word… until the 1800s. Sneaked was the proper English past tense form for sneak since the 1500s, but snuck appeared in regular use in America in the 1800s. As a result, the improper word snuck became an officially recognized word.

This is not normal. No other word like sneak uses an uck ending for the past tense form. Leak does not turn to luck. Streak does not turn to struck. But it is, in fact, perfectly acceptable for sneak to turn to snuck.