Woodworking Word of the Day: Sneck

While rereading the August 2008 issue of Popular Woodworking, I noticed a word I had never heard or seen before: sneck. In his review of the Brese 800-series planes, Christopher Schwartz said "I wish the iron had a full sneck—a horizontal bar of metal—which would make the iron easier to retract."

For reference, the plane iron on the Brese plane was similar to the standard iron found on most hand planes:

I couldn't picture it from his description. When I looked up sneck in the dictionary, however, there was no reference to plane irons. The only dictionary definition had to do with door latches.

I thought the clearest definition came from Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 2d edition: "SNECK, that part of the iron fastening of a door which is raised by moving the latch. To sneck a door, is to latch it." So the sneck, in fact, is a hooked end of a traditional door latch, which minus the handle looks something like this:

Some research on the Web, however turned up two types of sneck used on plane irons, and after seeing the type used on some plow planes, it is easy to imagine that the term comes directly from the traditional definition of sneck—the hooked end of a traditional plow iron looks like a door sneck with the thumb rest removed:

I don't think that is the type of sneck that Christopher Schwartz was picturing. I think that the "full sneck" he had in mind would look like this:

I have no idea whether etymologists would confirm my suspicion that plane snecks are so called because of the resemblance to door snecks, but that's my story and I'm snecking to it.