Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
SNUG
Thanks to the Viking depredations in Britain in the ninth century, particularly the occupation of most of northern and eastern England during the period of the Danelaw, English harbors quite a few words of Scandinavian origin.
Snug, one of them, derives from a series of Germanic words and appears to be a cognate of the Swedish snygg and Danish snyg, "neat," "tidy." The OED registers a naval sense from the sixteenth century: "Of a ship or her parts: Trim, neat, compact; adequately or properly prepared for, or protected from, bad weather."