Snuck sneaked inMike Rappaport

Tom writes that he “sneaked away” in his post on The 300.  I paused at that, “sneaked” or “snuck,” concluding that sneaked was correct, but still sounded a little funny and snuck almost sounded right.

My intutions were correct.  According to AskOxford.com:

From the beginning, and still in standard British English, the past tense and past participle forms are sneaked. Just as mysteriously, in a little more than a century, a new past tense form, snuck,has crept and then rushed out of dialectal use in America, first intothe areas of use that lexicographers label jocular or uneducated, andmore recently, has reached the point where it is a virtual rival ofsneaked in many parts of the English-speaking world. But not inBritain, where it is unmistakably taken to be a jocular or non-standardform.

Of course, given Tom’s stay at Oxford, one would not expect him to use snuck, and I guess I wouldn’t  either, but now that I understand the matter I am a bit more likely to do so in the future.