snark

noun

1. (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 weapon to cut its target down to size.”

   “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.”

   “She liked his smile. There was neither snark nor megalomania in it, as characterized so many smiles these days.”

2. (literary)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.”

3. 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.
4. (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.”

5. (abbreviation, acronym, alt-of)Acronym of 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, Proceedings, Springer, LNCS 11774, page 223, 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.”

   “2020, Fuyuki Kitagawa, Takahiro Matsuda, Takashi Yamakawa, NIZK from SNARG, Rafael Pass, Krzysztof Pietrzak (editors), Theory of Cryptography: 18th International Conference, Proceedings, Part I, Springer, LNCS 12550, page 568, Actually, what is often used in blockchains is a SNARK [4], which is a stronger variant of a SNARG that satisfies extractability.”

verb

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. (obsolete)To snort.

name

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