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"Ironic" redirects here. For the song by Alanis Morissette, see Ironic (song).

Irony is best known as a figure of speech (more precisely called verbal irony) in which there is a gap or incongruity between what a speaker or a writer says, and what is understood. It can also be considered a twist of fate where an eventual occurrence relates back to a particular quote. All the different senses of irony, however, revolve around the notion of incongruity, or a gap between our understanding and what actually happens. For instance, tragic irony occurs when a character onstage is ignorant, but the audience watching knows his or her eventual fate, as in Sophocles' play Oedipus the King. Socratic irony, the oldest form, takes place when someone pretends to be foolish or ignorant, but is not. Cosmic irony is a sharp incongruity between our expectations of things and what actually occurs, as if the universe were mocking us.

H. W. Fowler, in Modern English Usage, had this to say of irony:

Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware, both of that "more" and of the outsider's incomprehension.

Irony has some of its foundation in the onlooker's perception of paradox. In June 2005, the State of Virginia Employment Agency, which handles unemployment compensation, announced that they would lay off 400 employees for lack of work because unemployment is so low in the state. The reader's perception of a disconnection between common expectation, and the application of logic with an unexpected outcome, both has an element of irony in it and shows the connection between irony and humor, when the surprise startles us into laughter. Not all irony is humorous: "grim irony" and "stark irony" are familiar.