English

Proper noun

Snark

1. A fictional animal in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.
2. A ketch built by Jack London named after Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark

Derived terms

• snark

Translations

References

1. ↑ Carroll, Lewis: The Hunting of the Snark: With and Introduction and notes by Martin Gardner, p. 45. Penguin Books, London 1995. ISBN 0-14-043491-7

Anagrams

• ARNKs
• knars
• Kṛṣṇa
• narks
• ranks
• skarn

English

Noun

snark ‎(uncountable)

1. Snide remarks.

Synonyms

• (snide comments): sarcasm

Related terms

• snarkiness
• snarky

Verb

snark ‎(third-person singular simple present snarks, present participle snarking, simple past and past participle snarked)

1. To express oneself in a snarky fashion
   • 2009, January 23, “Dwight Garner”, in 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.”

2. (obsolete) To snort.

Derived terms

• snarker

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]

Noun

snark ‎(plural snarks)

1. (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.
2. (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.

References

1. ↑ “snarky” in Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary (2001).
2. ↑ Martin Gardner, Mathematical Games, Scientific American, issue 234, volume 4, pp. 126–130, 1976.

Anagrams

• ARNKs, knars, Kṛṣṇa, narks, ranks, skarn