Q: Is there a reason why “cuddle” and “huddle” have the same “-uddle” ending, and “snuggle” has the slightly similar “-uggle”?
A: As far as we can tell, “cuddle,” “huddle,” and “snuggle” aren’t related. They got their “-uddle” and “-uggle” spellings in different ways.
“Cuddle,” for example, is “a dialectal or nursery word of uncertain derivation,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED says it may have come from the Old English cúð, meaning snug or cosy (the letter ð was pronounced “th”). An unrecorded form, cúðle, may have become “cuddle,” as fiðele became “fiddle.”
Oxford says “huddle” is also “of uncertain origin” but may ultimately be a “diminutive and iterative” form of the prehistoric Germanic root hud- (to cover). An iterative, or frequentive, is a verb expressing repeated, frequent action (like “slither” and “slide”).
And “snuggle,” the OED says, was “formed within English, by derivation,” combining the verb “snug” (once spelled with a double “g”) and the suffix “-le.”
As the dictionary explains, one function of the suffix “-le” is to form verbs from other parts of speech, like adjectives, or to create a diminutive or frequentive version of an earlier verb.
Examples formed in Old English, the dictionary says, include “nestle, twinkle, wrestle.” In Middle and early modern English such words included “crackle, crumple, dazzle, hobble, niggle, paddle, sparkle, topple, wriggle, etc.”
And some, the OED adds, come “from echoic roots, as babble, cackle, gabble, giggle, guggle, mumble, etc.” (Usually, a consonant that follows a vowel is doubled when it appears before an “-le” suffix.)
Of the three words you mention, the first to appear was “cuddle,” which Oxford defines as “to press or draw close within the arms, so as to make warm and ‘cosy’; to hug or embrace affectionately, to fondle.”
The cuddling involved a farm animal in the earliest OED citation: “Cudlyng of my cowe.” From a song, written around 1520, cited in Reliquiæ Antiquæ (1845), a collection of medieval and Renaissance writing, edited by Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell.
The next word, “huddle,” originally meant “to put or keep out of sight; to conceal or hide, as among a crowd or under a heap; to hush up,” a usage that’s now obsolete, the OED says.
The dictionary’s earliest citation is from an English translation of a Latin epistle defending the Church of England. It’s a response to epistles by Jerónimo Osório da Fonseca, Bishop of Silves, Portugal, urging Queen Elizabeth I to embrace Roman Catholicism:
“To chop of the head of the sentence, and slyly huddle the rest [Latin: qui sententiæ caput abscindens astute reliqua subtices].” From Against Ierome Osorius Byshopp of Siluane (1581), James Bell’s translation of an epistle by Walter Haddon and John Foxe.
The OED defines the last of the three, “snuggle,” as “to lie snug or close, esp. for warmth or comfort; to settle down cosily or comfortably; to get or press close to a person, esp. as a mark of affection; to nestle.”
The dictionary’s first example is from an entry in an English-French dictionary: “To Snuggle, or to snuggle together, se serrer dans un Lit.” From The Great French Dictionary (1688), by the author and lexicographer Guy Miege.
A final note: The earliest version of “when pigs fly,” an expression used to say something will never happen, appeared in the translation of the Latin epistle mentioned above:
“This is a great promise, my good Lord: But when will this be done? when pigges flye with their tayles foreward.”
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