sniping?

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Sat, Nov 27, 2004 at 06:03:14PM -0500, Bethany K. Dumas wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Nov 2004, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>
> >> I ran into this term this week - is its use widespread? Here is a
> >> quotation from a recent WSJ story about sniping on eBay:
> >
> >Yes, it's extremely widespread.
>
> Thanks. What other contexts does it occur in?

None, so far as I know. That is, there are other current
verbs _to snipe_ (the other newish one referring to the
surreptitious placement of advertising stickers for
music promotion), but this is pretty exclusive to eBay
and similar sites.

(In most traditional forms of auction, sniping as such
is not possible, because there's no fixed time when an
auction ends: any new bid will extend the time.)

Jesse Sheidlower
OED