The word "snipped" can seemingly be used to mean "said in a snippy manner":
"No," she snipped, obviously annoyed
—http://rosemarinetheater.blogspot.com/2013/05/white-boy-can-rap-looking-at-benny-in.html…the former president was emphatic. "No," he snipped.
—http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/02/03/no-bernie-sanders-is-not-barack-obama"No," she snipped. "You're American, aren't you? You're not very popular here today."
—http://www.city-journal.org/html/london-peace-marchers-say-long-live-intifada-9989.html
Yet no dictionary (of the dozen or so I consulted) documents this usage. Not even the OED [paywall], which documents every obscure meaning every word has had over the past 500 years. Not even urbandictionary, in which anyone can add words and definitions with no editorial oversight.
Is this meaning too rare for dictionaries to document? It strikes me as a somewhat unusual but not obscure construction when I run across it. But of course it's difficult to google for a word used with a specific meaning when that word also has a vastly more widely used meaning. (You'll find a mix of hits and false positives searching for exact phrases such as "no she snipped," which is how I discovered the above citations.)
Is this meaning too new to have made it into any dictionaries? The oldest of the above citations is from 2003, and again, my sense is that it's been around longer than that (though again, without a way to effectively search, it's hard to say).
Is this usage actually an erroneous substitution for another word? "Sniped," for instance, can also be the verb in a dialogue tag, but it has a different meaning (one which could conceivably apply in the third citation above, but not the first two). I can't think what other word might be intended.
Has this meaning been collectively overlooked by all the major dictionary compilers? This seems extremely improbable, yet Sherlockianly correct.
Am I overlooking another possible explanation?
Best Answer
As chasly from UK suggested in a now-deleted answer to this question, snip as a verb meaning "speak curtly or snappishly" probably originated as a back-formation from the adverb snippily or the adjective snippy, which Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003) defines as follows:
The phrase "said snippily" goes back to at least 1914 in Google Books and Hathi Trust search results. From Rose Macaulay, The Making of a Bigot (1914):
From Shirley Seifert, "The Nicest Boy and What the Smartest Girl in the Office Did to Him," in The Delineator (July-August 1920):
Also, from a 1921 translation by Philip Allen of Johanna Spyri, Heidi:
Evidently, "snipped" has had more that a century to emerge as a short form of the phrase "said snippily."
Something similar seems to have happened with such verbs as crabbed, grumped, and huffed, which are likewise sometimes used as short-form alternatives to "said crabbily," "said grumpily," and "said huffily," respectively. But the Eleventh Collegiate accords each of these meanings a place in its dictionary:
If snip in the sense of "say snippily" continues to appear in published works, it is only a matter of time before an additional entry for snip as a transitive verb, along the lines of "to utter curtly or snappishly," appears in some future Merriam-Webster's dictionary. In the long term, it's hard to say whether the word's prospects will be helped or hindered by its visual and aural similarity to snap, sniff, and snipe—all of which can be used as verbs in kindred senses.