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Lately I have been seeing or hearing this unusual word, usually in adjectival form as “snarky.” But my correspondents or newspaper columnists or even MSNBC resident snark Rachel Maddow herself neglect to define the word. Of course it is not in the usual dictionaries, though I usually get from the context that the users of the word don’t particularly care for the person they are describing as “snarky.” See, for example, Peggy Noonan’s hit piece on Sarah Palin in the Wall Street Journal during the last presidential election. I’m not sure if Ms Noonan used the word “snarky” but it was certainly high class snideness.

Urban Dictionary has 46 different but usually related meanings for the word. I gather from a couple of the entries that the word has been around for maybe a century or so, having had some ups and downs in usage with much more activity in recent years as the number of both professional and amateur scribblers has increased almost geometrically. I think the most appropriate definition and the most easily remembered is “snide remark=snark(y)” where “snide=derogatory in a malicious, superior way.”

Perhaps the combination of “snide and sarcastic” might be appropriate too. If so, then both of these definitions are getting into the area of “portmanteau words” to mean a blend of two or more words. Wikipedia itself is a portmanteau word, a blend of Wiki and encyclopedia.

To me the most convincing entry was #43 which suggested that it was a form of family sniglet=any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should—a term created by comic Rich Hall from Not Necessarily the News in the 80s—like “cellopain=a person who talks loudly and obliviously on a cellphone in a crowd,” or “schoogle=to Google the names of old classmates.”

In the case of “snarky” it was a made-up nicer word for someone who was “bitchy.” Of course, I have no idea of how reliable these entries are. They seem to be listed in the order of how many thumbs up they get from their readers, thus #43 out of 46 is fairly low on the list.