Snob:
First, let us indulge ourselves by telling you where the term did not originate. Several sites elucidate ad nauseum on the erroneous and frequent attribution of "snob" to a shortening of the Latin sine nobilitate, or "without nobility." Apologies to fans of that particular dead language, but...afraid not.
So what is the origin? A bevy of etymological sites state the word first surfaced around 1781, as a term for "shoemaker" or his (gasp!) "apprentice." But by the late 18th century, Cambridge University students had given it a new connotation. A rather droll Jonah Goldberg claims said students "turned it into a word to describe the middle-class townies who tried to affect a station they didn't deserve."
Ask Oxford, of England's Oxford Dictionarys, informs us that by the early 19th century, the word had come to indicate laborers without breeding and "vulgar social climbers who aped the manners of the upper classes." It was William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the simply interminable novel "Vanity Fair," who popularized this particular meaning in his "Book of Snobs."
Only in the early 20th century did the word come to mean one who patronizes or rebuffs those considered to be socially inferior. Other opinions as to the term's origins do exist...but there you have it. ( Yahoo
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