The word alludes to good marksmanship, itself descendent of the shooting competitions ( Schützenfeste) that took place throughout the year in Munich in the 15th century. The older term sharpshooter comes from the calque of German word Scharfschütze, in use by British newspapers as early as 1801. The term sniper was first attested militarily in 1824, becoming common place in the First World War. This evolved to the agent noun sniper, first appearing by the 1820s. Accomplishing such a shot was regarded as exceptional, and inevitably during the late 18th century, the term snipe shooting was simplified to sniping. In the 18th century, letters sent home by English officers in India referred to a day's rough shooting as 'going sniping', as it took a skilled flintlock sportsman a lot of patience and endurance to wing-shoot a snipe in flight. Snipe hunters therefore needed to be stealthy in addition to being good trackers and marksmen. The name sniper comes from the verb to snipe, which originated in the 1770s among soldiers in British India in reference to shooting snipes, a wader that was considered an extremely challenging game bird for hunters due to its alertness, camouflaging color and erratic flight behavior. In training, snipers are given charts that they’re drilled on to ensure they can make last-minute calculations when they are in the field. They also need to have the skill set to use data from their scope and monitors to adjust their aim to hit targets that are extremely far away. Snipers need to have complete control of their bodies and senses in order to be effective. In addition to long-range and high-grade marksmanship, military snipers are trained in a variety of special operation techniques: detection, stalking, target range estimation methods, camouflage, tracking, bushcraft, field craft, infiltration, special reconnaissance and observation, surveillance and target acquisition. Snipers generally have specialized training and are equipped with high-precision rifles and high-magnification optics, and often also serve as scouts/ observers feeding tactical information back to their units or command headquarters. A sniper is a military/ paramilitary marksman who engages targets from positions of concealment or at distances exceeding the target's detection capabilities.

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