Skip to content
Vinony

snark

noun

  1. connected, bridgeless cubic graph with chromatic index equal to 4
L27891 on Wikidata ↗

verb

No English definition recorded for this entry.

L27892 on Wikidata ↗

Wiktionary

Pronunciation: /snɑː(ɹ)k/

name

Etymology: 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.

  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

noun

Etymology: 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.

  1. 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 promising as the hunting of the snark.”

    “Remy said Dad was hunting snarks; at the time, she'd thought it was a euphemism.”

  2. 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.
  3. 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.”

verb

Etymology: 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.

  1. 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.””

    “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.”

  2. To snort.