![]() The numbers are very fluid, changing from hour to hour, but they always show “sneak peek at” in the lead. The result is that “sneak peek at” leads “sneak peek of” by a margin of roughly five to four. We also did ordinary Google searches, which are broader and more up to date but don’t include as many books as the Ngram Viewer. It also shows that “sneak peek at” (like the narrower phrase “sneak peek”) first showed up in books in 1951, and that “sneak peek of” followed in 1988.Īs you can see, by 2008 the line for “sneak peek at” was sharply higher than that for “sneak peek of.” The graph tracks each phrase as a percentage of all three-word sequences. The Google Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in millions of books, shows “sneak peek at” outnumbering “sneak peek of” by a margin of about seven to one as of 2008, the latest year available. It’s also preferred among the population as a whole, but not by as wide a margin. ![]() Writers of books seem to support our own preference for “sneak peek at” by a wide margin. As with “sneak peek at/of,” we can only examine preferences we can’t declare one usage right and the other wrong. Why, for instance, do most of us say “a glance at” but “a glimpse of”? Chalk it up to common usage. Our own preference is for “at.” To our ears, “Take a sneak peek at this” sounds more natural than “Take a sneak peek of this.”īut as we’ve written many times before, the use of prepositions is highly idiomatic, and common usage ultimately determines what is considered standard English. Our research shows that most people prefer “sneak peek at,” but a sizable number would choose “sneak peek of” instead. Q: I’ve always used “at” with “sneak peek,” as in “I had a sneak peek at episode 8.” Lately, I’ve heard people use “of” instead of “at.” That sounds wrong to my ear, perhaps only because of what I’m used to. Is there a preference?Ī: There are differences of opinion here.
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