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snark.

an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm.

5 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/snɑː(ɹ)k/
  1. an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm.

    uncountable
Where this word comes from

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.

verb/snɑː(ɹ)k/
  1. To express oneself in a snarky fashion.

  2. To snort.

    obsolete
Where this word comes from

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.

noun/snɑː(ɹ)k/
  1. The fictional creature of Lewis Carroll's poem, used allusively to refer to fruitless quest or search.

    literary
  2. 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.

  3. A fluke or unrepeatable result or detection in an experiment.

    particle
    Cabrera's Valentine's Day monopole detection or some extremely energetic cosmic rays could be examples of snarks.
Where this word comes from

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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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.