1The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

1. 1.1A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result.
   ‘the irony is that I thought he could help me’
   More example sentences

   • ‘one of life's little ironies’
   • ‘It would be the final irony of this extraordinary affair if the fight were to be cancelled on the grounds that it could be a threat to public order.’
   • ‘It's at this point I begin to wonder whether Wayne's post is actually satirical, replete with deliberate ironies I completely missed.’
   • ‘There's plenty of irony in seeing one monopoly accuse another monopoly of restricting users' choices.’
   • ‘There are dilemmas, ironies and paradoxes within this context.’
   • ‘The paradoxes and ironies of this situation are endless.’
   • ‘It would be the perfect irony if today's opponents provided the spark that Scotland need to beat them in their own magnificent Millennium Stadium.’
   • ‘In perfect irony, one of them was seen pasting posters on the pedestal of the Kamaraj statue to publicise an agitation in the city on Tuesday.’
   • ‘The irony is almost too perfect: Malls are now being designed to resemble the downtown commercial districts they replaced.’
   • ‘Havana is all of these simultaneously, a place of contradictions and ironies, never settling down to visitor's expectations.’
   • ‘For the rest of us, it is a morality tale - a complicated one filled with ironies and contradictions, but a morality tale nonetheless.’
   • ‘He was the great appreciator of the country's breadth and energy, its strengths, ironies and contradictions.’
   • ‘But perhaps the most bitter and disturbing irony is that the best surf tends to arrive during the winter.’
   • ‘The greatest irony of this case was that his wife was also a patient, presenting with insomnia due to shift work as a nurse.’
   • ‘To add irony to injury, his reselection was itself a result of an injury to the captain Jason Robinson.’
   • ‘The irony of the growing shortage is that in responding to it, China could soon find itself with too much capacity.’
   • ‘In a strange twist of irony, this very narrowing down of themes may result in a wider audience.’
   • ‘The irony of that situation was that Stalin judged Hitler to be more rational than in fact he was.’
   • ‘The irony was that Airdrie emerged from the match with one of their best results after one of their poorest performances.’
   • ‘In a case of savage irony, Yost ended up supervising the termination of many of the engineers he helped to hire.’
   • ‘The irony is that the farming methods causing the drainage will result in their own demise, as they use up the topsoil and render the ground infertile.’
   Synonyms

   paradox, paradoxical nature, incongruity, incongruousness, peculiarity

   View synonyms
2. 1.2A literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character's words or actions is clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character.
   ‘They considered dramatic monologue, dramatic irony, persona as mask, and so on.’
   More example sentences

   • ‘The novel's tragic irony serves to pique the conscience of the reader, as well as to spotlight Steinbeck's political concerns for the equality and happiness of all members of the human family’
   • ‘Schlegel's Romantic irony was a reaction to the systematic thought of Kant.’
   • ‘Oedipus Rex is notable for its use of dramatic irony: everybody in the audience knows from the start that Oedipus himself is the guilty party he seeks out for punishment.’
   • ‘A palpable sense of irony, derived from Greek tragedy, embeds itself in the noirish landscape.’
   • ‘I was teaching a basic college writing course one summer at the local community college and I wanted to explain irony as a literary device.’
   • ‘The tragic irony here for an artist like Schoenberg was that the only way to realize art's concept, autonomy, meant that he had to indirectly affirm the system he was fleeing.’
   • ‘And the handkerchief becomes transformed again, by tragic irony, into a visual argument for Desdemona's adultery.’
   • ‘Psychological realism is therefore heightened at the expense of tragic irony.’
   • ‘A Doll's House also contains many examples of dramatic irony.’
   • ‘There is also an example of dramatic irony when Huck tells of the drunk horseman at the circus.’

Of or like iron.