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crunch

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crunch

  [kruhnch]
Use crunch in a Sentence
–verb (used with object)
1. to crush with the teeth; chew with a crushing noise.
2. to crush or grind noisily.
3. to tighten or squeeze financially: The administration's policy seems to crunch the economy in order to combat inflation.
–verb (used without object)
4. to chew with a crushing sound.
5. to produce, or proceed with, a crushing noise.
–noun
6. an act or sound of crunching.
7. a shortage or reduction of something needed or wanted: the energy crunch.
8. distress or depressed conditions due to such a shortage or reduction: a budget crunch.
9. a critical or dangerous situation: When the crunch comes, just do your best.
—Idiom
10. crunch numbers, Computers.
a. to perform a great many numerical calculations or extensive manipulations of numerical data.
b. to process a large amount of data.
Also, craunch.

Origin:
1795–1805; b. craunch and crush

Related forms:
crunch⋅a⋅ble, adjective
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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crunch   (krŭnch)   
v.   crunched, crunch·ing, crunch·es

v.   tr.

  1. To chew with a noisy crackling sound.

  2. To crush, grind, or tread noisily.

  3. Slang To perform operations on; manipulate or process (numerical or mathematical data).

v.   intr.

  1. To chew noisily with a crackling sound: crunching on celery.

  2. To move with a crushing sound: crunching through the snow.

  3. To produce or emit a crushing sound.

n.  

  1. The act or sound of crunching.

  2. A modified sit-up having a smaller range of motion that reduces back strain and strengthens the abdominal muscles: stomach crunches.

    1. A decisive confrontation.

    2. A critical moment or situation, especially one that occurs because of a shortage of time or resources: a year-end crunch; an energy crunch.

    3. A period of financial difficulty characterized by tight money and unavailability of credit.


[Alteration of craunch, possibly of imitative origin.]
crunch'a·ble adj.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Slang Dictionary
crunch

  1. n.
    a crisis; a time of pressure or tightness, especially of a budget. : The budget crunch meant that we couldn't take trips to Europe anymore.
Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions by Richard A. Spears.Fourth Edition.
Copyright 2007. Published by McGraw Hill.
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Word Origin & History

crunch 
1814, from craunch (1631), probably of imitative origin. The noun is 1836, from the verb; the sense of "critical moment" was popularized by Winston Churchill, whose first recorded use of it was in 1939. Crunchy is from 1892; student slang sense of "annoyingly intense about health or environmental issues" is 1980s, short for crunchy granola; not entirely pejorative at first.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
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Computing Dictionary

crunch
1. 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 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.
[The Jargon File]
(2007-11-12)

The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2007 Denis Howe
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