MEANING
1. To overwhelm someone with more work, requests, or other demands than they can readily manage.
2. To defeat an opponent by a very large margin, especially in a contest or election.
Use it for
describing more work than someone can handle; explaining a backlog of unanswered requests; showing why a response is delayed; distinguishing overload from ordinary busynessExpresses demands exceeding someone’s ability to keep up, with a separate large-defeat sense. Writing functions: Workload / Overwhelm. Semantic categories (by meaning): Workload / Overwhelm. Contexts: General conversation; Creative prose.
Words that belong together
- be snowed under with work
- snow someone under with requests
On the page
The small office was snowed under with applications after the announcement.
The new reporting rules snowed the team under just before the audit.
The independent candidate snowed the established party under in the local contest.
Their opponents were snowed under at the polls despite a vigorous final campaign.
Word forms
- Base
- snow under
- Past tense
- snowed under
- Past participle
- snowed under
- Present participle
- snowing under
Full tense & aspect guide
- Present
- snow under
- Present continuous
- am/is/are snowing under
- Present perfect
- have/has snowed under
- Present perfect continuous
- have/has been snowing under
- Past
- snowed under
- Past continuous
- was/were snowing under
- Past perfect
- had snowed under
- Past perfect continuous
- had been snowing under
- Future
- will snow under
- Future continuous
- will be snowing under
- Future perfect
- will have snowed under
- Future perfect continuous
- will have been snowing under
Choose the auxiliary that agrees with your subject. These are constructions of one word, not separate entries.
Usage notes
Transitive separable phrasal verb: snows under, snowed under, snowed under, snowing under; future will snow under. Snow someone under; pronoun object before under. Workload sense usually passive: be snowed under with/by work. Register: informal. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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