snark
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snark¹
- /snɑː(ɹ)k/
Rhymes with -ɑː(ɹ)k
Where it 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
- an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm. 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 wea
verb snarks · snarking · snarked
- To express oneself in a snarky fashion. Other would-be Bright Young People, Lytton Strachey snarked, seemed to have “just a few feathers where brains should be.”
- To snort.
snark²
- /snɑː(ɹ)k/
Rhymes with -ɑː(ɹ)k
Where it 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.
noun snarks
- The fictional creature of Lewis Carroll's poem, used allusively to refer to fruitless quest or search. 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 promis
- 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.
- 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.
Snark³
- /snɑː(ɹ)k/
Rhymes with -ɑː(ɹ)k
Where it comes from
Coined by Lewis Carroll as a nonce word in The Hunting of the Snark (1874). According to Beatrice Hatch, Carroll created this word as a blend of snail + shark.
proper noun
- A fictional animal in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.
- A ketch built by Jack London named after Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark
SNARK⁴
noun SNARKs
- Acronym of succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge 2019, Anca Nitulescu, Lattice-Based Zero-Knowledge SNARGs for Arithmetic Circuits, Peter Schwabe, Nicolas Thériault (editors), Progress in Cryptology – LATINCRYPT 2019: 6th International Conference, Proceedings, Springer, LNCS 11774, page 223, SNARG vs. SNARK. If we replace the computational soundne
Translations
Talk about this word "snark." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/snark. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026. snark. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/snark "snark." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/snark.Cite this
@misc{snark_2026,
title = {snark},
howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
year = {2026},
url = {https://micwyn.com/word/snark},
urldate = {2026-11-06}
}
