scare quotes

American  

plural noun

1. a pair of quotation marks used around a term or phrase to indicate that the writer does not think it is being used appropriately or that the writer is using it in a specialized sense.

   a “huge breakthrough” in the negotiations.

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scare quotes British  

plural noun

1. quotation marks placed around a word or phrase to indicate that it should not be taken literally or automatically accepted as true

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Etymology

Origin of scare quotes

First recorded in 1955–60

Example Sentences

The experiment doesn’t entirely come off; for the most part, Larraín and his co-writer, Guillermo Calderón, traffic in a smirkily theoretical kind of horror, trapping real tension in scare quotes.

From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 7, 2023

I used various forms of magical thinking, persuading myself that my own version of those bad tweets contained implied scare quotes or subtle irony that distinguished them.

From New York Times • Apr. 28, 2022

As you can probably tell from the unnecessary scare quotes in the previous sentence, I don’t like it.

From The Verge • Oct. 13, 2021

Beethoven, in and out of scare quotes, has become a godlike abstraction of himself, complete with one-word moniker — his music less a product of culture than a feature of nature.

From Washington Post • Dec. 23, 2020

These are not words that go in scare quotes.

From Slate • Nov. 3, 2020