A snowball is a ball of snow, usually created by scooping snow with the hands and compacting it into a roughly fist-sized ball. A snowball fight is an exuberant free-form game played often by children, in which participants throw snowballs at each other.
Other uses of the word snowball include:
- Snowball programming language (computing)
- Snowball, a character in George Orwell's political satire Animal Farm.
- Snowball, a feline character in The Simpsons.
- Snowballing: (Slang) A sexual practice in which semen is transferred, orally, into the mouth of a person who has just been fellated. This transfer is usually via a French kiss. See also fellatio.
- The nickname of the character William Black from Kevin Smith's Clerks and Mallrats movies. The name refers to the aforementioned sexual practice.
- A cocktail, briefly fashionable in the 1970s, made of about one part of Advocaat (a Dutch brand of egg nog) and eight parts of lemonade, usually served with ice and a slice of lemon.
- A regional treat made of shaved ice and flavorings popular in Baltimore, Maryland.
- A situation, event or the like is said to snowball if it continually grows in intensity or magnitude. This is a reference to the way snowballs get bigger gradually by picking up more snow when one rolls them around or down a hill.