Smile-smirk

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An instance of smile-smirking; a combined smile and smirk.

    "[…] and he'd quickly pull out and jettison a storm, turbospewing her back and hair and sheets and face and ears and sly, conniving little smile-smirk."

Verb
  1. 1
    To smile while smirking.

    "She smilesmirked supercilious (wept! aren’t men?), but, lightward gliding, mild she smiled on Boylan."

Example

More examples

"She smilesmirked supercilious (wept! aren’t men?), but, lightward gliding, mild she smiled on Boylan."

Etymology

Compound of smile + smirk. Coined by Irish novelist and poet James Joyce in his 1922 novel Ulysses (see quotation below).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.