noun · uncountable · rare

snark

An attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasmAn attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm.

/snɑː(ɹ)k/

» "Can I get a smile?" "I'm all out of those, but I've got plenty of snark."

Meaning

4 senses

(uncountable)An attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm.
(literary)The fictional creature of Lewis Carroll's poem, used allusively to refer to fruitless quest or search.
A graph in which every node has three branches, and the edges cannot be coloured in fewer than four colours without two edges of the same colour meeting at a point.
(particle)A fluke or unrepeatable result or detection in an experiment.
Cabrera's Valentine's Day monopole detection or some extremely energetic cosmic rays could be examples of snarks.

Examples

1 sentences

"Can I get a smile?" "I'm all out of those, but I've got plenty of snark."
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Origin

Noun sense “snide remark” as back-formation from snarky (1906), from obsolete snark (“to s

Noun sense “snide remark” as back-formation from snarky (1906), from obsolete snark (“to snore, snort”, verb) (1866), from Middle English *snarken (“to snore”), from Proto-West Germanic *snarkōn, equivalent to snore + -k. Compare Low German snarken, North Frisian snarke, Swedish snarka, German schnarchen, and English snort and snore. Of Germanic origin, but ultimately onomatopoeic.

From Snark, coined by Lewis Carroll as a nonce word in The Hunting of the Snark (1874), about the quest for an elusive creature. In sense of “a type of mathematical graph”, named as such in 1976 by Martin Gardner for their elusiveness.

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