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say it: AHY-ruh-nee
irony is a noun meaning "witty language used to convey insults or scorn". It is pronounced /ˈaɪɹəni/ — AHY-ruh-nee. It carries 3 recorded senses.
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”
incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs
“the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated”
a trope that involves incongruity between what is expected and what occurs
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for irony come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.