snark
/snɑː(ɹ)k/
snark noun: an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm.
Noun (1)
snark (uncountable)
- 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...2010 October 19, Michael Kackman, Marnie Binfield, Matthew Thomas Payne, Allison Perlman, Bryan Sebok, Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, Routledge, →ISBN, page 65
- 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.2010 December 17, David Denby, Snark, Pan Macmillan, →ISBN, page 4
Verb
snark (third-person singular simple present snarks, present participle snarking, simple past and past participle 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.”2009 January 23, Dwight Garner, “The Mahvelous and the Damned”, in New York Times
- 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.2018, Maria Maggenti, Daniel Beaty, “Fallout”, in Supergirl, season 4, episode 2 (television production), spoken by Querl Dox (Jesse Rath)
- To snort.
Noun (2)
snark (plural 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...1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 345
- Remy said Dad was hunting snarks; at the time, she'd thought it was a euphemism.2019, Karl Schroeder, Stealing Worlds
- 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.
Proper noun capitalized: Snark
Snark
Noun (3) capitalized: SNARK
SNARK (plural SNARKs)
- Acronym of succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge.
- SNARG vs. SNARK. If we replace the computational soundness with computational Knowledge Soundness we obtain what we call a SNARK, a 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...
- Actually, what is often used in blockchains is a SNARK [4], which is a stronger variant of a SNARG that satisfies extractability.2020, Fuyuki Kitagawa, Takahiro Matsuda, Takashi Yamakawa, NIZK from SNARG, Rafael Pass, Krzysztof Pietrzak (editors), Theory of Cryptography: 18th International Conference, Proceedings, Part I...
Examples of snark in a sentence
- 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.2010 October 19, Michael Kackman, Marnie Binfield, Matthew Thomas Payne, Allison Perlman, Bryan Sebok, Flow TV: Television in the Age of...
- There was neither snark nor megalomania in it, as characterized so many smiles these days.2017, Dean Koontz, The Silent Corner, page 54:
Synonyms of snark
Forms of snark
| Verb | |
|---|---|
| third-person singular present | snarks |
| present participle | snarking |
| past participle | snarked |
| past | snarked |
| Noun | |
| plural | snarks |
| plural | SNARKs |
Origin of snark
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.
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.
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.
Words formed from snark
Words that rhyme with snark
28 more rhymesFewer rhymes
Questions about snark
- What does snark mean?
- Snark means an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm.
- How do you use snark in a sentence?
- 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.
- What part of speech is snark?
- Snark can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce snark?
- Snark is pronounced /snɑː(ɹ)k/.
- What is the plural of snark?
- The plural of snark is snarks.
Words near snark in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: snark (page history and authors); Snark (page history and authors); SNARK (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-snark.wav.
Cite this entry: “snark.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/snark. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.