SATIRE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does satire mean? 

• SATIRE (noun)
  The noun SATIRE has 1 sense:

1. witty language used to convey insults or scorn

  Familiarity information: SATIRE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• SATIRE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Witty language used to convey insults or scorn

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Synonyms:

caustic remark; irony; sarcasm; satire

Context example:

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own

Hypernyms ("satire" is a kind of...):

humor; humour; wit; witticism; wittiness (a message whose ingenuity or verbal skill or incongruity has the power to evoke laughter)

Attribute:

sarcastic (expressing or expressive of ridicule that wounds)

unsarcastic (not sarcastic)

Derivation:

satiric; satirical (exposing human folly to ridicule)

satirise (ridicule with satire)

satirist (a humorist who uses ridicule and irony and sarcasm)

satirize (ridicule with satire)

 Context examples 

Bravo! An excellent satire on modern language.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

I had not expected him to be, and was not surprised myself; or my observation of similar practical satires would have been but scanty.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of history.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)