crunch

v. munch, chew with the teeth; crush

n. chewing with the teeth; sound made by crunching; pressured situation

Crunch may refer to:Nestlé Crunch, a brand of candy and ice cream produced by Nestle.An onomatopoeic description of a common distorted guitar sound. An intelligent dance music project that includes Dave Tipper and Mike Wallis.Crunch (exercise), a strength training exercise for the abdominal muscles.The mascot for the Minnesota Timberwolves basketball team.Crunch Bandicoot, a fictional character.CRUNCH (graffiti artist), a New York City subway graffiti artist.CRUNCH (programming block), a collection of television programs, aired on YTV during Saturday mornings.John Draper, a Vietnam War veteran who become one of the world's first hackers in early 1971.Crunch, a stone man in The Cowardly Lion of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson.
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Noun
1. the sound of something crunching; "he heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path"
(hypernym) noise
(derivation) scranch, scraunch, crackle
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"
(hypernym) situation
3. the act of crushing
(synonym) crush, compaction
(hypernym) compression, compressing
(hyponym) grind, mill, pulverization, pulverisation
(derivation) grind, mash, bray, comminute
Verb
1. make crunching noises; "his shoes were crunching on the gravel"
(synonym) scranch, scraunch, crackle
(hypernym) make noise, resound, noise
(hyponym) crump, thud, scrunch
2. press or grind with a crunching noise
(synonym) cranch, craunch, grind
(hypernym) press
3. chew noisily; "The children crunched the celery sticks"
(synonym) munch
(hypernym) chew, masticate, manducate, jaw
4. reduce to small pieces or particles by pounding or abrading; "grind the spices in a mortar"; "mash the garlic"
(synonym) grind, mash, bray, comminute
(hypernym) break up, fragment, fragmentize, fragmentise
(hyponym) pulp
(derivation) crush, compaction

(v. t.)
To crush with the teeth; to chew with a grinding noise; to craunch; as, to crunch a biscuit.
  

(v. i.)
To grind or press with violence and noise.
  

(v. i.)
To emit a grinding or craunching noise.
  

(v. i.)
To chew with force and noise; to craunch.
  

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. To reduce the size of a file without losing information by a complicated scheme that produces bit configurations completely unrelated to the original data, such as by a Huffman code. 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 crunching" to distinguish it from number crunching.) Use of crunch itself in this sense is rare among Unix hackers.
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]
(2002-03-14)