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Snark

The eponymous snark in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark is a fictional animal, the quarry for a hunting party comprising some highly unlikely characters. They are warned that if their snark is a boojum they will swiftly and silently vanish away and never be heard of again.

The word "snark" is an amalgam of "snake" and "shark".


In graph theory, a snark is a graph in which each vertex has three edges, but it is impossible to color the edges with only three colors so that edges of the same color don't meet at one vertex. A boojum is a planar snark. See Four-Color Theorem.


The SM-62 Snark was an intercontinental nuclear cruise missile of the US Air Force that was operational in 1960 and 1961.