Irony \I"ron*y\, a. [From Iron.]
[1913 Webster]
1. Made or consisting of iron; partaking of iron; iron; as,
irony chains; irony particles; -- In this sense iron is
the more common term. [R.] --Woodward.
[1913 Webster +PJC]
2. Resembling iron in taste, hardness, or other physical
property.
[1913 Webster]
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
Irony \I"ron*y\, n. [L. ironia, Gr. ? dissimulation, fr. ? a
dissembler in speech, fr. ? to speak; perh. akin to E. word:
cf. F. ironie.]
[1913 Webster]
1. Dissimulation; ignorance feigned for the purpose of
confounding or provoking an antagonist.
[1913 Webster]
2. A sort of humor, ridicule, or light sarcasm, which adopts
a mode of speech the meaning of which is contrary to the
literal sense of the words.
[1913 Webster]
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
irony
n 1: witty language used to convey insults or scorn; "he used
sarcasm to upset his opponent"; "irony is wasted on the
stupid"; "Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders
do generally discover everybody's face but their
own"--Johathan Swift [syn: sarcasm, satire, caustic
remark]
2: incongruity between what might be expected and what actually
occurs; "the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she
most hated"
3: a trope that involves incongruity between what is expected
and what occurs
WordNet (r) 2.0
76 Moby Thesaurus words for "irony":
Atticism, Janus, agile wit, ambiguity, ambiguousness, ambivalence,
amphibology, antinomy, biformity, bifurcation, black humor,
burlesque, caricature, causticity, comedy, complexity of meaning,
conjugation, cynicism, dichotomy, double entendre, double meaning,
double reference, doubleness, doublethink, doubling, dry wit,
dualism, duality, duplexity, duplication, duplicity, equivocacy,
equivocality, equivocalness, equivocation, esprit, farce, halving,
humor, innuendo, invective, lampoon, levels of meaning,
multivocality, nimble wit, oxymoron, pairing, paradox, parody,
paronomasia, pleasantry, polarity, polysemousness, polysemy,
pretty wit, punning, quick wit, ready wit, richness of meaning,
salt, sarcasm, satire, satiric wit, savor of wit,
self-contradiction, slapstick, slapstick humor, squib, subtle wit,
travesty, twinning, two-facedness, twoness, uncertainty,
visual humor, wit
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0
IRONY, rhetoric. A term derived from the Greek, which signifies
dissimulation. It is a refined species of ridicule, which, under the mask of
honest simplicity or ignorance, exposes the faults and errors of others, by
seeming to adopt or defend them.
2. In libels, irony may convey imputations more effectually than direct
assertion, and render the publication libelous. Hob. 215; Hawk. B. 1, c. 73,
s. 4; 3 Chit. Cr. Law, 869, Bac. Ab. Libel, A 3.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856)
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