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.
Meanings
(uncountable) an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm.
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:
She liked his smile. There was neither snark nor megalomania in it, as characterized so many smiles these days. 2017, Dean Koontz, The Silent Corner, page 54:
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 weapon to cut its target down to size. 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:
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.
Meanings
To express oneself in a snarky fashion.
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):
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:
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.
Meanings
(literary) The fictional creature of Lewis Carroll's poem, used allusively to refer to fruitless quest or search.
Remy said Dad was hunting snarks; at the time, she'd thought it was a euphemism. 2019, Karl Schroeder, Stealing Worlds:
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. 1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 345:
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.
(particle) 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.