snark

Meanings

Noun

• Snide remarks or attitude.
• 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.

Verb

• To express oneself in a snarky fashion.
• To snort.

Origin

• Noun sense “snide remark” as (1906), from obsolete snark (1866), from Middle English snarken. Compare Low German snarken, North Frisian snarke, Swedish snarka, and English snort, and snore.
• From Snark, 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.