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Snark vs Sass - What's the difference?

snark | sass |

As nouns the difference between snark and sass

is that snark is snide remarks while sass is sarcasm, backtalk, cheek.

As verbs the difference between snark and sass

is that snark is to express oneself in a snarky fashion while sass is to talk, to talk back.

As a proper noun Snark

is a fictional animal in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.

snark

English

Etymology 1

Compare Low German snarken, North Frisian snarke, Swedish snarka, and English snort, and snore. Noun sense of “snide remarks” derived from snarky (1906), from snark (v.) "to snort" (1866) by onomatopoiea. (en)

Noun

(-)
  • Snide remarks.
    • Synonyms
    * (snide comments) sarcasm
    Related terms
    * snarkiness * snarky

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • To express oneself in a snarky fashion
  • * {{quote-news, 2009, January 23, Dwight Garner, The Mahvelous and the Damned, New York Times citation
    • , passage=Other would-be Bright Young People, Lytton Strachey snarked , seemed to have “just a few feathers where brains should be.” }}
  • (obsolete) To snort.
    • Derived terms
    * snarker

    Etymology 2

    From (Snark), coined by (Lewis Carroll) as a nonce word in 1874 (The Hunting of the Snark), 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.Martin Gardner, (Mathematical Games), (Scientific American), issue 234, volume 4, pp. 126–130, 1976.

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • (mathematics) 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.
  • (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 .

    References

    Anagrams

    * English eponyms

    sass

    English

    Noun

    (-)
  • (US) sarcasm, backtalk, cheek.
  • *
    • “Say — if you give me much more of your sass I’ll take and bounce a rock off’n your head.”
  • *
    • “Looky here — mind how you talk to me; I’m a-standing about all I can stand now — so don’t gimme no sass .”

    Derived terms

    * sassy

    Verb

    (es)
  • (US) To talk, to talk back.
  • *
    • “The duke he begun to abuse him for an old fool, and the king begun to sass back, and the minute they was fairly at it I lit out and shook the reefs out of my hind legs, and spun down the river road like a deer, for I see our chance; and I made up my mind that it would be a long day before they ever see me and Jim again.”
  • *
    • “But, good land! what did he want to sass back for? You see, it couldn’t do him no good, and it was just nuts for them.”