2245: sneeze Feb 6, 2021

There is an Proto-Indo-European root *snu- that has led to a number of semantically related words including just in English ‘nose’, ‘snot’, and ‘snout’. In that, ‘sneeze’ should not be included, though its association would be obvious on first glance. Consider that the word in Middle English was ‘fnese’ from the earlier Old English ‘fnēosan’, related to a number of other Germanic words like the Dutch ‘fniezen’. Many sources will say this change over time is due to a misprint, but people don’t often cause change of common words in their own language for this sort of thing, and the change is historically attested from [f] to [s] in other words too, including ‘snore’ with all word-initial [fn] falling out of use by the 15th century. That said, once [fn] had been lost, it could certainly have been influenced both by other semantically related word (even if not etymologically related) and indeed spelling.