The term sneeze can be traced back to the fifteenth century, with various forms such as snese, sneese, scniese, and sneez being documented during that time. In Middle English, it was even spelled as fnesen, with an interesting evolution of the initial letter. The use of the long s, resembling an f (ſ), led to the modification of the spelling to incorporate the long s, as words beginning with fn- were rare in English. Derived from Old English fneosan and Proto-Germanic fneu, the term ultimately stems from the Proto-Indo-European root pneu, meaning “to breathe”.
