From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Irony \I"ron*y\, adjective [From {Iron}.]
1. Made or consisting of iron; partaking of iron; iron; as, irony chains; irony particles; -- In this sense {iron} is the more common term. [R.] --Woodward. [1913 Webster +PJC]
2. Resembling iron in taste, hardness, or other physical property.
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Irony \I"ron*y\, noun [L. ironia, Gr. ? dissimulation, fr. ? a dissembler in speech, fr. ? to speak; perh. akin to E. word: cf. F. ironie.]
1. Dissimulation; ignorance feigned for the purpose of confounding or provoking an antagonist.
2. A sort of humor, ridicule, or light sarcasm, which adopts a mode of speech the meaning of which is contrary to the literal sense of the words.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
noun
1: witty language used to convey insults or scorn; "he used sarcasm to upset his opponent"; "irony is wasted on the stupid"; "Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own"--Johathan Swift [syn: {sarcasm}, {satire}, {caustic remark}]
2: incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs; "the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated"
3: a trope that involves incongruity between what is expected and what occurs
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
76 Moby Thesaurus words for "irony": Atticism, Janus, agile wit, ambiguity, ambiguousness, ambivalence, amphibology, antinomy, biformity, bifurcation, black humor, burlesque, caricature, causticity, comedy, complexity of meaning, conjugation, cynicism, dichotomy, double entendre, double meaning, double reference, doubleness, doublethink, doubling, dry wit, dualism, duality, duplexity, duplication, duplicity, equivocacy, equivocality, equivocalness, equivocation, esprit, farce, halving, humor, innuendo, invective, lampoon, levels of meaning, multivocality, nimble wit, oxymoron, pairing, paradox, parody, paronomasia, pleasantry, polarity, polysemousness, polysemy, pretty wit, punning, quick wit, ready wit, richness of meaning, salt, sarcasm, satire, satiric wit, savor of wit, self-contradiction, slapstick, slapstick humor, squib, subtle wit, travesty, twinning, two-facedness, twoness, uncertainty, visual humor, wit
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