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• n  an aggressive remark directed at a person like a missile and intended to have a telling effect
• n  the pointed part of barbed wire
• n  a subsidiary point facing opposite from the main point that makes an arrowhead or spear hard to remove
• n  one of the parallel filaments projecting from the main shaft of a feather
• v  provide with barbs
  barbed wire

• Hart's earnest rebuttals and belated attempts to deflect the barb with humor (he held his book, A New Democracy, between hamburger buns) did little to stem the damage.
• In 1880, old Colonel Miller had built the first barb wire fence in the district.
• Perhaps the sharpest barb yet hurled at the Kellogg Peace Pact came last week from onetime Director Salvador de Madariaga of the Disarmament Section of the League of Nations.

• shot
• shaft
• slam
• dig
• jibe
• gibe

Quotes

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• John Stainton in Independent
  John Stainton, who witnessed the incident, said that Irwin swam over the stingray "and the stingray's barb went up and into his chest and put a hole into his heart".
• Lon Kruger in Detroit Free Press
  I haven't thought a single moment about that or anywhere else,said Kruger, who coached in the Big Ten at Illinois in 1996-2000. "You can scratch me off any list you want to. No contact at all and no thoughts about any other positions. Barb...
• Ross Finnie in The Herald
  That will call for a leader that can match his oratory, think on his feet, vary the tempo and in the face of gratuitous abuse, deploy barb and humour in equal measure,Mr Finnie said "I believe I have all the qualities that fit that pattern...