  The interband optical absorption of linearly polarised light by
two-dimensional (2D) semimetals hosting tilted and anisotropic Dirac cones in
the bandstructure is analysed theoretically. Super-critically tilted (type-II)
Dirac cones are characterised by an absorption that is highly dependent on the
incident photon polarisation and frequency, and is tunable by changing the
Fermi level with a back-gate voltage. Type-II Dirac cones exhibit open Fermi
surfaces and large regions of the Brillouin zone where the valence and
conduction bands sit either above or below the Fermi level. As a consequence,
unlike their sub-critically tilted (type-I) counterparts, type-II Dirac cones
have many states that are Pauli blocked even when the Fermi level is tuned to
the level crossing point. We analyse the interplay of the tilt parameter with
the Fermi velocity anisotropy, demonstrating that the optical response of a
Dirac cone cannot be described by its tilt alone. As a special case of our
general theory we discuss the proposed 2D type-I semimetal 8-$Pmmn$ Borophene.
Guided by our in-depth analytics we develop an optical recipe to fully
characterise the tilt and Fermi velocity anisotropy of any 2D tilted Dirac cone
solely from its absorption spectrum. We expect our work to encourage Dirac cone
engineering as a major route to create gate-tunable thin-film polarisers.
