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You know when you get runny, bunged up, or stuffy nose, you tend to blow it but sometimes it can be so frequent that you're not up to it anymore and simply try to breathe it in. Or another example is when a co-worker standing next to you who has a cold, too, looking at the blueprint with you and continuiusly is making this wierd sucking slurpy noise with his nose which is really disgusting, too (at least to me, no offence). Technically it's blowing your nose just the other way around.

  1. What do you call it in English? And if there are some informal words to describe it, please bring them up, too.

(In my native language we say "pull up the nose")

  1. What do you call a person who's always like this, I mean, a person who has stuffy nose almost always and doesn't like to blow his nose and instead just breathe it in.

(In my native language we call the person informally "snotty", although in English they use snotty to describe a thing dirty with mucus)

Thanks

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    I'd call that 'sniffing' (Br Eng)
    – peterG
    Commented Apr 9, 2016 at 19:21

1 Answer 1

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snuffle - to ​breathe in ​quickly and ​repeatedly through the ​nose, usually because you are ​crying or because you have a ​cold

I can't stand your snuffling any longer.

snotty has more than one meaning- one of which is 'covered in snot'. It doesn't really describe the breathing in.

snuffler is not in the dictionary, but everybody would know what you mean if you said it about somebody that does it all the time.

He's a snuffler.

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    This is a minor nitpick, but I would say "Sniffle" instead. "Snuffle" sounds a little weird to me.
    – DJMcMayhem
    Commented Apr 9, 2016 at 16:08
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    Sniffle and snuffle are variants. Maybe sniffling is a little gentler than snuffling.
    – TimR
    Commented Apr 9, 2016 at 16:10
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    @Yuri: It's OK to talk to somebody about snuffling, but I can't imagine anybody saying "snuffle it completely", because what they have to do next is swallow it, which is (for me at least) gross. Just "Blow your nose, you're making me sick".
    – JavaLatte
    Commented Apr 9, 2016 at 16:46
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    Snorting certainly has the connotation of breathing rapidly through the nose, but with the exception of recreational drugs, it doesn't have the 'moving solids' connotation. It does have other meanings too: dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/snort
    – JavaLatte
    Commented Apr 9, 2016 at 16:53
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    @JavaLatte You think it's "gross", and yet you do it all the time; mucus produced in your lungs is pushed up by the cilia up into the throat, then swallowed. That's why you swallow so much. It's a perfectly natural thing to do. ;-)
    – wizzwizz4
    Commented Apr 9, 2016 at 19:51

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