Etymology of "snob"

Question

Some dictionaries mention an origin involving shoemakers...  But I can't say the link is straightforward, really.

mplungjan · Accepted Answer

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=snob&searchmode=none

snob 
      1781, "a shoemaker, a shoemaker's apprentice," of unknown origin. It
  came to be used in Cambridge
  University slang c.1796 for "townsman,
  local merchant," and by 1831 it was
  being used for "person of the ordinary
  or lower classes." Meaning "person who
  vulgarly apes his social superiors"
  arose 1843, popularized 1848 by
  William Thackeray's "Book of Snobs."
  The meaning later broadened to include
  those who insist on their gentility,
  in addition to those who merely aspire
  to it, and by 1911 had its main modern
  sense of "one who despises those
  considered inferior in rank,
  attainment, or taste."

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/originsnob

People often claim that this word
  originated as an abbreviated form of
  the Latin phrase sine nobilitate,
  meaning 'without nobility' (i.e. 'of a
  humble social background'). Various
  accounts of the circumstances in which
  this abbreviation was supposedly used
  have been put forward: on lists of
  names of Oxford or Cambridge students;
  on lists of ships' passengers (to make
  sure that only the best people dined
  at the captain's table); on lists of
  guests to indicate that no title was
  required when they were announced.
  
  The theory is ingenious but highly
  unlikely. The word snob  is first
  recorded in the late 18th century as a
  term for a shoemaker or his
  apprentice. At about this time it was
  indeed adopted by Cambridge students,
  but they didn't use it to refer to
  students who lacked a title or were of
  humble origins; they used it generally
  of anyone who was not a student.
  
  By the early 19th century snob was
  being used to mean a person with no
  'breeding', both the honest labourers
  who knew their place, and the vulgar
  social climbers who copied the manners
  of the upper classes. In time the word
  came to describe someone with an
  exaggerated respect for high social
  position or wealth who looks down on
  those regarded as socially inferior.
  
  It's quite possible that the phrase
  sine nobilitate may have appeared in
  one context or another, but it is
  difficult to see why it would have
  given rise to a word for a shoemaker.

PS: many of google books from 18th century seems to OCR the word such as snob making the NGRAM viewer give false positives

Interesting link to a book from 1840 -

http://books.google.com/books?id=Em0qAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22snob%22&pg=PA73#v=onepage&q=%22snob%22&f=false

Cazaubon · Answer

I've heard from different sources that snob is short for latin "sin nobile" (or "sin nobilitate" ?).
In high-end colleges, pupils which were not of a noble family had "s. nob." written close to their names.
And they gained the reputation of trying to mimic, in an outrageous way, the habits of "true nobles"

apaderno · Answer

The NOAD reports the following note about the origin of the word.

ORIGIN late 18th century (originally dialect in the sense ‘cobbler’): of unknown origin; early senses conveyed a notion of "lower status or rank," later denoting a person seeking to imitate those of superior social standing or wealth. Folk etymology connects the word with Latin sine nobilitate, "without nobility", but the earliest recorded sense has no connection with this.

Alain Pannetier Φ · Answer

I came across the snob entry in John Ayto's "Words Origin - The Hidden Histories of English Words from A to Z", which I quote here in extenso, just for the record although there are several valuable answers already.

Snob originally meant a ‘shoemaker’.
  Cambridge University students of the
  late 18th century took it over as a
  slang term for a "townsman, someone
  not a member of the university", and
  it seems to have been this usage which
  formed the basis in the 1830s for the
  emergence of the new general sense
  ‘member of the lower orders’ (‘The
  nobs have lost their dirty seats – the
  honest snobs have got ’em’, proclaimed
  the Lincoln Herald on 22 July 1831,
  anticipating the new Reform Act). 
  
  This in turn developed into
  ‘ostentatiously vulgar person’, but it
  was the novelist William Thackeray who
  really sowed the seeds of the word’s
  modern meaning in his Book of
  Snobs 1848, where he used it for
  ‘someone vulgarly aping his social
  superiors’. 
  
  It has since broadened out to include
  those who insist on their gentility as
  well as those who aspire to it. 
  
  As for the origins of the word snob
  itself, they remain a mystery. An
  ingenious suggestion once put forward
  is that it came from s. nob.,
  supposedly an abbreviation for Latin
  sine nobilitate ‘without nobility’,
  but this ignores the word’s early
  history.

Callithumpian · Answer

Curious about this shoemaker origin, I put on my Google goggles and found an interesting letter to the editor in a 1762 issue of London Magazine from a Jeffery Snob, shoemaker. Not sure what to make of it. I've thought of several possibilities:

It's just a strange coincidence.
The letter writer anonymized himself with a pseudonym relating to his trade.
It's a fake letter written so the editor could freely editorialize via his fictional Snob.
Ol' Jeff was not only real, but went on to become London's greatest cobbler thus giving us eponymous snob.

If 2. or 3. is the answer, then it's a use of snob=cobbler 19 years earlier than Etymonline has. But I'm sure curious if it's an actual surname. I couldn't find any other examples of folks named Snob other than in a song from 1798, "Doctor Jeremy Snob," where the play on the last name is evident:

I not only patch up your Bodies; But Soles I can likewise renew.

Etymology of "snob"

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