snark

1. uncountablean attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm.

   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

   2 more examples

   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

   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

   Synonyms: sarcasm, snideness

present singular third person snarks · participle present snarking · participle past snarked · past snarked

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.”

   2009 January 23, Dwight Garner, “The Mahvelous and the Damned”, in New York Times

   1 more example

   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)

2. obsoleteTo snort.

plural snarks

1. literaryThe 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

   1 more example

   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

2. mathematicsA 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. particlenatural sciencesA 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.

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

plural SNARKs

1. abbreviationacronymcomputingAcronym of succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge.

   3 more examples

   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.

   2023, Matteo Campanelli, Chaya Ganesh, Hamidreza Khoshakhlagh, Janno Siim, Impossibilities in Succinct Arguments: Black-Box Extraction and More, Nadia El Mrabet, Luca De Feo, Sylvain Duquesne (editors), Progress in Cryptology - AFRICACRYPT 2023: 14th International Conference, Proceedings, Springer, LNCS 14064, page 467, Whether we can build SNARKs with black-box extraction in the standard model is an elusive problem. […] In particular, we show that a SNARG can be lifted to a SNARK with the features above for the class of languages FewP (roughly, NP with polynomial many witnesses).