scare quote

scare quote

n.

Either of a pair of quotation marks used to emphasize a word or phrase or to indicate its special status, especially to express doubt about its validity or to criticize its use.

Thesaurus

Noun

1.

scare quote - the use of quotation marks to indicate that it is not the authors preferred terminology inverted comma, quotation mark, quote - a punctuation mark used to attribute the enclosed text to someone else