snail

1. 1.

   gather snails

   “We went snailing in the summer”

   Broadergather

   Narrowerwhelk

Other forms of snail

plural

snails·

past tense

snailed·

present participle

snailing·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about snail

What does snail mean?

snail means "freshwater or marine or terrestrial gastropod mollusk usually having an external enclosing spiral shell". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in snail?

snail has 1 syllable: snail. In IPA it is /ˈsneɪl/.

What is another word for snail?

Close synonyms include escargot. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is snail a common word?

snail is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.