snark
English edit
Pronunciation edit
Etymology 1 edit
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.[1] Of Germanic origin, but ultimately onomatopoeic.
Noun edit
snark (uncountable)
- Snide remarks or attitude.
- 2017, Dean Koontz, The Silent Corner, page 54:
- She liked his smile. There was neither snark nor megalomania in it, as characterized so many smiles these days.
Related terms edit
Verb edit
snark (third-person singular simple present snarks, present participle snarking, simple past and past participle snarked)
- To express oneself in a snarky fashion.
- 2009 January 23, Dwight Garner, “The Mahvelous and the Damned”, in New York Times[1]:
- Other would-be Bright Young People, Lytton Strachey snarked, seemed to have “just a few feathers where brains should be.”
- 2018, Maria Maggenti, Daniel Beaty, “Fallout”, in Supergirl, season 4, episode 2 (television production), spoken by Querl Dox (Jesse Rath):
- 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.
- (obsolete) To snort.
Derived terms edit
Etymology 2 edit
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.[2]
Noun edit
snark (plural snarks)
- (literary) The fictional creature of Lewis Carroll's poem, used allusively to refer to fruitless quest or search.
- 1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 345:
- 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.
- 2019, Karl Schroeder, Stealing Worlds[2]:
- Remy said Dad was hunting snarks; at the time, she'd thought it was a euphemism.
- (mathematics) 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.
- (physics) 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.
Derived terms edit
Further reading edit
snark on Wikipedia.Wikipedia - Snark (Lewis Carroll) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
- “snark”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
- “snark”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
References edit
- ^ Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “snarky”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
- ^ Martin Gardner, (1976). Mathematical Games. Scientific American, volume 4, issue 234, pages 126–130.
Anagrams edit
Icelandic edit
Pronunciation edit
Noun edit
snark n (genitive singular snarks, no plural)
- crackle (of a fire)
Declension edit
Related terms edit
- snarka (“to crackle”)
Swedish edit
Etymology edit
Interjection edit
snark
- zzz (representing a snoring sound)
- Synonym: (in writing) zzz
- (slang) An expression of boredom
- Synonym: (in writing) zzz
- Snark! ― Boring!
Noun edit
snark n
Declension edit
| Declension of snark | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | |||
| Indefinite | Definite | Indefinite | Definite | |
| Nominative | snark | snarket | snark | snarken |
| Genitive | snarks | snarkets | snarks | snarkens |
Derived terms edit
Related terms edit
- snarka (“to snore”)