snark
Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also Snark
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[edit] English
[edit] Pronunciation
[edit] Etymology 1
Compare Low German snarken, North Frisian snarke, Swedish snarka,[1] and English snarl, snort, and snore. Noun sense of “snide remarks” derived from snarky (1906).
This definition is lacking an etymology or has an incomplete etymology. You can help Wiktionary by giving it a proper etymology.
[edit] Noun
snark (uncountable)
[edit] Synonyms
- (snide comments): sarcasm
[edit] Related terms
[edit] Verb
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”:
- Other would-be Bright Young People, Lytton Strachey snarked, seemed to have “just a few feathers where brains should be.”
- 2009 January 23, Dwight Garner, “The Mahvelous and the Damned”:
- (obsolete) To snort.
[edit] Derived terms
[edit] Etymology 2
From Snark, coined by Lewis Carroll as a nonce word in 1874 The Hunting of the Snark, 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]
[edit] Noun
snark (plural snarks)
- (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.
[edit] References
- ^ “snarky” in the Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper, 2001
- ^ Martin Gardner, Mathematical Games, Scientific American, issue 234, volume 4, pp. 126–130, 1976.
