snark
/snɑː(ɹ)k/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.65 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To express oneself in a snarky fashion.
noun
The fictional creature of Lewis Carroll's poem, used allusively to refer to fruitless quest or search.
Literary
noun
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.
noun
A fluke or unrepeatable result or detection in an experiment.
name
A fictional animal in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.
Example Sentences
- "Brit-wit, in fact, could be seen as the precursor to the communicative style valorized on these beratement panels and on fan/rating communities, namely snark or snarkasm. Snark, a hybrid of “snide” and “remark," is a biting, casual verbal attack. Its subtle insult comprises a tone that acts as a weapon to cut its target down to size."
- "Snark will get you any way it can, fore and aft, and to hell with consistency. In a media society, snark is an easy way of seeming smart. […] Snark doesn't create a new image, a new idea. It's parasitic, referential, insinuating."
- "She liked his smile. There was neither snark nor megalomania in it, as characterized so many smiles these days."
- "Other would-be Bright Young People, Lytton Strachey snarked, seemed to have “just a few feathers where brains should be.”"
- "Ah! That was "snark". You snark when your blood sugar is low. I know how to help you. Pizza. Humans seem to find calm in the consumption of food."
- "When the auctioneer had exhausted his vocabulary in describing the merits of an animal, his winding-up formula was "One times! two times! three times!" Then the hammer gave a tap, and he and our party would devote our energies to discovering the last bidder - a research which generally was as promising as the hunting of the snark."
Etymology
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.