Meaning
A process in which something small grows steadily larger and more consequential under its own momentum, each increase making the next easier. Usually said of problems, debts, rumours or trends that accelerate as they go, though it can describe beneficial spirals too. Neutral register, common in news, business and psychology; it implies steady accelerating momentum rather than a single dramatic event. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The literal image is a snowball rolling downhill and gathering snow as it goes; etymonline notes that this picture had appeared in English since at least 1613. The noun snowball itself is recorded from around 1400, and figurative senses grew around it, including an 1892 American use of a 'snowball' for a fraudulent pyramid scheme. The verb snowball, meaning to increase rapidly by accretion, is attested from 1929, and the fixed phrase 'snowball effect' then spread through 20th-century journalism, economics and psychology, where it labels self-reinforcing feedback of any kind. A 1905 Minneapolis Journal cartoon, showing students rolling an ever-larger snowball of trouble for Tsar Nicholas II, shows the metaphor at work decades before the phrase settled into its modern fixed form.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a snowballing problem
- like a rolling snowball
- snowballing
- snowballing effect
- the snowball effect
Usage Examples
- What began as one missed payment turned into a snowball effect of late fees and interest that took her two years to clear.
- Officials worried that each new closure would create a snowball effect, dragging down the shops that stayed open.
- The campaign's early momentum had a snowball effect: volunteers recruited more volunteers, and donations doubled every week.