crunch
from
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)
crunch
n 1: the sound of something crunching; "he heard the crunch of
footsteps on the gravel path"
2: a critical situation that arises because of a shortage (as a
shortage of time or money or resources); "an end-of-the year
crunch"; "a financial crunch"
3: the act of crushing [syn: {crush}, {crunch}, {compaction}]
v 1: make a crushing noise; "his shoes were crunching on the
gravel" [syn: {crunch}, {scranch}, {scraunch}, {crackle}]
2: press or grind with a crushing noise [syn: {crunch},
{cranch}, {craunch}, {grind}]
3: chew noisily; "The children crunched the celery sticks" [syn:
{crunch}, {munch}]
4: reduce to small pieces or particles by pounding or abrading;
"grind the spices in a mortar"; "mash the garlic" [syn:
{grind}, {mash}, {crunch}, {bray}, {comminute}]
from
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
Crunch \Crunch\ (kr[u^]nch), v. i. [imp. & p. p. {Crunched}
(kr[u^]ncht); p. pr. & vb. n. {Crunching}.] [Prob. of
imitative origin; or cf. D. schransen to eat heartily, or E.
scrunch.]
1. To chew with force and noise; to craunch.
[1913 Webster]
And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter
skull. --Byron.
[1913 Webster]
2. To grind or press with violence and noise.
[1913 Webster]
The ship crunched through the ice. --Kane.
[1913 Webster]
3. To emit a grinding or craunching noise.
[1913 Webster]
The crunching and ratting of the loose stones. --H.
James.
[1913 Webster]
from
Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003)
crunch
1. vi. To process, usually in a time-consuming or complicated way.
Connotes an essentially trivial operation that is nonetheless painful
to perform. The pain may be due to the triviality's being embedded in
a loop from 1 to 1,000,000,000. "FORTRAN programs do mostly
{number-crunching}."
2. vt. To reduce the size of a file by a complicated scheme that
produces bit configurations completely unrelated to the original data,
such as by a Huffman code. (The file ends up looking something like a
paper document would if somebody crunched the paper into a wad.) Since
such compression usually takes more computations than simpler methods
such as run-length encoding, the term is doubly appropriate. (This
meaning is usually used in the construction file crunch(ing) to
distinguish it from {number-crunching}.) See {compress}.
3. n. The character #. Used at XEROX and CMU, among other places. See
{ASCII}.
4. vt. To squeeze program source into a minimum-size representation
that will still compile or execute. The term came into being
specifically for a famous program on the BBC micro that crunched BASIC
source in order to make it run more quickly (it was a wholly
interpretive BASIC, so the number of characters mattered). {Obfuscated
C Contest} entries are often crunched; see the first example under
that entry.
from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
crunch
1. <jargon> To process, usually in a time-consuming or
complicated way. Connotes an essentially trivial operation
that is nonetheless painful to perform. The pain may be due
to the triviality's being embedded in a loop from 1 to
1,000,000,000. "Fortran programs do mostly {number
crunching}."
2. <compression> To reduce the size of a file without losing
information by a scheme such as {Huffman coding}. Since such
{lossless compression} usually takes more computations than
simpler methods such as {run-length encoding}, the term is
doubly appropriate.
3. The {hash character}. Used at {XEROX} and {CMU}, among
other places.
4. To squeeze program source to the minimum size that will
still compile or execute. The term came from a {BBC
Microcomputer} program that crunched {BBC BASIC} {source} in
order to make it run more quickly (apart from storing
{keywords} as byte codes, the language was wholly interpreted,
so the number of characters mattered). {Obfuscated C Contest}
entries are often crunched; see the first example under that
entry.
[{Jargon File}]
(2007-11-12)
from
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0
186 Moby Thesaurus words for "crunch":
appulse, atomize, bang, bang into, belch, bind, bite, blare, blat,
bray, break into pieces, break to pieces, break up, brunt,
bulldozing, bulling, bump, bump into, burr, buzz, cackle, cannon,
carambole, carom, carom into, caw, champ, chaw, chew, chirr, chomp,
chump, clang, clangor, clank, clash, climacteric, clutch, collide,
collision, come into collision, complication, concuss, concussion,
confront each other, convergence of events, crack up, crack-up,
crash, crash into, craunch, crisis, critical juncture,
critical moment, critical point, croak, crossroads, crucial period,
crump, crush, crux, cut to pieces, dash into, demolish, diffuse,
disperse, disrupt, embarrassing position, embarrassment, emergency,
encounter, exigency, extremity, fall foul of, fine how-do-you-do,
fission, foul, fragment, grate, grind, groan, growl, grumble,
hammering, hell to pay, high pressure, hinge, hit, hit against,
hobble, hot water, how-do-you-do, hurt, hurtle, imbroglio, impact,
imperativeness, impinge, impingement, jam, jangle, jar, juncture,
knock, knock against, make mincemeat of, masticate, mauling, meet,
meeting, mess, mince, mix, moment of truth, morass, munch,
onslaught, parlous straits, pass, percuss, percussion, pickle,
pinch, plight, predicament, press, pressure, pretty pass,
pretty pickle, pretty predicament, pulverize, push, quagmire,
quicksand, ramming, rasp, repercussion, rub, ruminate, run into,
scatter, scranch, scrape, scratch, scrunch, shatter, shiver, shock,
showdown, sideswipe, slam into, sledgehammering, slough,
smack into, smash, smash into, smash up, smash-up, smashing, snarl,
snore, splinter, spot, squash, squeeze, squish, stew,
sticky wicket, strait, straits, stress, strike, strike against,
swamp, tension, thrusting, tight spot, tight squeeze, tightrope,
tricky spot, turn, turning point, twang, unholy mess, urgency,
whomp
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