snuff
/snʌf/ noun C1- Finely ground or pulverized tobacco (or other plant derivative) intended for use by being sniffed or snorted into the nose.
- Fine-ground or minced tobacco, dry or moistened, intended for use by placing a pinch behind the lip or beneath the tongue.
- A snort or sniff of fine-ground, powdered, or pulverized tobacco.
- The act of briskly inhaling by the nose; a sniff, a snort.
- Resentment or skepticism expressed by quickly drawing air through the nose; snuffling; sniffling.
Plural snuffs
From the library
However, scarcely was the imperial power established—that is, scarcely had the emperor re-entered the Tuileries and begun to issue orders from the closet into which we have introduced our readers,—he found on the table there Louis XVIII.’s half-filled snuff-box,—scarcely had this occurred when Marseilles began, in spite of the authorities, to rekindle the flames of civil war, always smouldering in the south, and it required but little to excite the populace to acts of far greater violence than the shouts and insults with which they assailed the royalists whenever they ventured abroad.
“Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.”
“Well, the snuff, then, and the Freemasonry?”
“Your experience has been a most entertaining one,” remarked Holmes as his client paused and refreshed his memory with a huge pinch of snuff.
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