It's a long time since I heard the word sneck, a latch. Sneck is a northern word, imported from either Scotland or northern England. Stevenson used it in Catriona, and it was recorded in Patterson's glossary of Antrim and Down words at the end of the last century. John Scott sent me the word from Ballyclare.
There were some interesting compounds. A sneckdrawer is an intruder, or an unwelcome visitor. A contributor to the English Dialect Dictionary, a native of Fife, explained: "When a neighbour slipped in for a crack there was some art in introducing himself to the household, so much so that a wily pawky flatterer was known familiarly as an auld sneckdrawer."
A snecklifter was both an intruder and the price of a cheap drink, to allow a sponger to get initiated into a public house. In Cumbria, when a horse was tied up outside a pub it was said to eat sneck-hay. "To put a sneck before his snout" meant to shut the door on an unwelcome guest. The word is found in the 15th century as snekk, and is of uncertain origin.
I have seen snibs on many's the farmhouse kitchen door in Ulster. This is how the EDD describes it. "The snib is a small piece of wood by inserting which into the loop the sneck becomes fast and cannot be raised from the outside". I've also heard the ordinary sliding bolt referred to as a snib in Donegal, and not long ago I heard a young woman remind her boyfriend to snib the car door after he had parked it outside Sweeney's hotel in Dungloe.
I suppose the word is related to snib, meaning to check, restrain; if I'm right the word has a Scandinavian origin. Compare Middle Swedish snybba, which also meant to rebuke. This is what Chaucer had in mind when he wrote: "Him wold be snibben sharply for the nones."
A.J. Newcombe, a native of York now residing in Dublin, wrote about the word famble, which meant to stutter, to speak unintelligibly. The EDD says that this is also of Scandinavian origin, which won't surprise a Yorkshireman. There is, for instance, the Danish famle, to stammer.
P.J. Nolan of Carrowbloughmore House, Kilkee, sent me a quotation from the Clare Journal of February 25th, 1889: ". . . the pliant tool of Norbury, Vandaleur and the perjured pimping fillibadanda." Can anybody help him with the fword. I can't, I'm afraid.