What is "sardonic"

Usage examples of "sardonic".

Reeling, stumbling, Barranca fell into the wall and slid slowly down until he sat propped against it, staring back with a sardonic red-freckled grimace.

The mortician was looking sardonic over a large dish of blood-coloured ice cream.

In an execrable left-slanting hand, he announced, employing a sardonic tone that had not been present in his first letters from Lisbon, that the old tubafter a series of delays, reversals, mechanical failures, and governmental tergiversations, had finally been cleared yet againfor departure, on the second of December.

The girls disrobed at once, pausing in different stages to point proudly to their garish underthings and bantering all the while with the gaunt and dissipated old man with the shabby long white hair and slovenly white unbuttoned shirt who sat cackling lasciviously in a musty blue armchair almost in the exact center of the room and bade Nately and his companions welcome with a mirthful and sardonic formality.

He received the same office at Court which he had held under Napoleon, Grand Chamberlain, and afterwards remained a sardonic spectator of events, a not unimposing figure attending at the Court ceremonials and at the heavy dinners of the King, and probably lending a helping hand in 1830 to oust Charles X.

An inside job carried out with clocklike precision at a set rendezvous by the gangs of human scum who were the present tenants of the home of that sardonic and ancient beast, the Skal.

Sardonic humor flourished alongside despair, and for every personalized story of emotional exhaustion and shattered lives, it usually was possible to find an up-lifting counterexample of resilience, hope, and accomplishment.

It found an updraft and drifted with it, wings spread and motionless, then paused in front of him, floating, a white beautiful set of wings, a sardonic cynical head with downcurved mouth and expressionless inspecting eyes.

They went out in a body, with the exception of Leek, peering carefully before them as they went George turned the light out in the bar and they returned unmolested to the coffee-room, and, avoiding the sardonic smile of Leek, prepared to separate for the night.

He gave Sherra a mocking, sardonic smile despite the growing arousal tightening his body.

Salk Elan and the treasurer had established a truce of sorts as things never went beyond the occasional sardonic swipe.

You are even liable to face the unsympathetic comments of individual readers who will wax merry, sardonic, or contemptuous at your expense--and what are their qualifications for doing so?

A few ragged, sardonic cheers rose to greet him from the other squads, followed by a loud raspberry.

Under the golden discs of her shades, she wore cheekbones from some Amerindian ancestor and a wide slash of a mouth that was currently set in a sardonic line.

The priest, who was a perfect courtier, smiled in a manner, half kindly, half sardonic, and said that I was at that happy age when I had no need to think of anything, as my kind friends and relations did all my thinking for me.