Mycterism
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A subtle or scornful jibe. rare, rhetoric
"But he recovers himself soon, if only by the dry fashion in which he observes that, if anybody does not know it, the Greeks call certain kinds of allegory sarcasm, asteism, antiphasis, and parœmia, to which it may be well to at mycterism, a kind of derision which is dissembled, but not altogether concealed―as very neatly by M. Fabius Quintillianus in the passage before us."
Example
More examples"But he recovers himself soon, if only by the dry fashion in which he observes that, if anybody does not know it, the Greeks call certain kinds of allegory sarcasm, asteism, antiphasis, and parœmia, to which it may be well to at mycterism, a kind of derision which is dissembled, but not altogether concealed―as very neatly by M. Fabius Quintillianus in the passage before us."
Etymology
From Ancient Greek μυκτηρισμός (muktērismós), from μυκτηρίζω (muktērízō, “I sneer”), from μυκτήρ (muktḗr, “nostril”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.