It's the word of the day for April 3rd.
Today's word is snark, spelled S-N-A-R-K.
Snark is a noun.
It's an informal word that refers to an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the New York Times.
With Snark and whimsy,
Zelda Williams and the screenwriter Diablo Cody put a playfully macabre spin on the Frankenstein legend that doubles as a subversive exploration of the universal desire to be loved and understood.
Credit for the words Snark is often given to Lewis Carroll on the basis of his having written a poem with this word in the title back in the 1870s.
The modern snark, however, is a back formation, a class of words that includes burgle and backstab.
It comes from taking the longer word snarky and subtracting the why.
Snarky emerged in English around the turn of the 20th century,
initially with the meaning of snappish and crotchety,
and then later took on the sense of sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in tone or manner.
The noun snark is a much more recent addition to the language arising in the 1990s.
It was preceded by the verb snark,
meaning to make an irreverent or sarcastic comment to say something snarky,
which dates to the late 1980s.
With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.