When it first appeared, as a dialect word in the late 18th century, snob meant ‘cobbler’. It next surfaced as a Cambridge University slang term for a non-member of the university, and then came to refer to any ordinary person lacking high rank or status. The main modern sense, of a person who looks down on those regarded as socially inferior, is first recorded in 1848, in The Book of Snobs by William Makepeace Thackeray. Folk etymology connects snob with the Latin phrase sine nobilitate ‘without nobility’, but there is no convincing evidence for this.