"old-style dagger"

[jenk]

Today's weird crossword vocabulary term: snee. From the Random House web site:

The classic crossword clue for snee is "cut, old style." (As if its archaic status weren't obvious!) The term snick or snee (also written snick and snee) means 'to fight by cutting and/or thrusting with a swordlike knife'. It's also a noun meaning 'the act of fighting with such a knife', or it could refer to the knife itself. An earlier form of this term was stick or snee 'to thrust or cut', from Dutch stecken 'to thrust, stick' and snijden 'to cut'. By the end of the 17th century, this three-word term was contracted into the single word snickersnee, which is both a verb and a noun.