Snoutfair is a lovely discovery for anyone who collects old words: it sounds like an insult and means good-looking. The real history is a little sharper than the lists suggest.

It is genuinely old. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary — James Murray's New English Dictionary — has snout-fair as an adjective meaning having a fair countenance; fair-faced, comely, handsome, and marks it obsolete. Its earliest example is from the reformer William Tyndale's Practice of Prelates in 1530: if he come in to an house, & the wiff be snoutefayre he will rote him self there — if the wife is pretty, he will root himself there.

That first example already shows the catch. Snout-fair was rarely just praise. The dictionary's note on it is blunt: frequent in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, usually with some disparaging suggestion. A 1616 satire speaks of a snowt-faire, selfe-conceited asse. Pretty, and vain about it. Good-looking, and not much else.

The snout is the face — the nose and the parts around it — and fair is fair. Calling a face a snout may itself be part of the joke: a handsome snout is still a snout.

Two things have changed on the way to the modern word lists. The word has become a noun — a snoutfair, a good-looking person — where the old record has an adjective. And the sneer has mostly dropped away, leaving a quaint compliment. That is not wrong, exactly; words change. But if you call someone snoutfair in the old sense, you are telling them they are pretty and implying that is the best that can be said.