Akademik

(SNAP.uh.rawt.see)

n.

Amateur photographers who pursue celebrities to take their pictures.

— snaparazzo (singular) n.

Nokia has developed a security camera that can beam pictures directly to a phone if temperature or motion sensors are triggered, a useful safety tool. Yet the camera could be used to spy if installed inconspicuously at the site.

Celebrities could be the biggest target of phonecam photographers. A service called CelebSnapper is already dedicated to receiving phonecam shots of celebrities from mobile phone users and transmitting them to its paid subscribers. It has coined a term for its would-be photo-newshounds: the snaparazzi.

— Daithi O Hanluain, "Forget F-Stops: These Cameras Have Area Codes," The New York Times, July 3, 2003

Last month we caught Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman smooching at a Leafs game.

Now it's your turn to make a name for yourself.

Catch a current celebrity doing anything but what they're famous for, and your photo could be Pic of the Week in our Snaparazzi feature.

Keep your negs but send us a quick, one-hour photo of the paparazzi image you've snagged.

— "Be a Sun Snaparazzi," The Toronto Sun, June 15, 1994

This word combines snapshot (with its connotations of amateur photography) and paparazzi (freelance photographers who hound celebrities to take candid pictures to sell to newspapers and magazines). The singular form of the latter is paparazzo, a word that became associated with annoying celebrity photographers thanks to Federico Fellini's film La Dolce Vita (The Good Life), which included a street photographer named Signor Paparazzo. Appropriately, paparazzo means "buzzing insect" in dialect Italian.