crunch : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

English Dictionary: crunch	by the DICT Development Group
5 results for crunch
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
crunch n the sound of something crunching; "he heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path" 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" the act of crushing Synonym(s): crush, crunch, compaction v make a crushing noise; "his shoes were crunching on the gravel" Synonym(s): crunch, scranch, scraunch, crackle press or grind with a crushing noise Synonym(s): crunch, cranch, craunch, grind chew noisily; "The children crunched the celery sticks" Synonym(s): crunch, munch reduce to small pieces or particles by pounding or abrading; "grind the spices in a mortar"; "mash the garlic" Synonym(s): grind, mash, crunch, bray, comminute
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Crunch \Crunch\ (kr[ucr]nch), v. i. [imp. & p. p. {Crunched} (kr[ucr]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. And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull. --Byron. 2. To grind or press with violence and noise. The ship crunched through the ice. --Kane. 3. To emit a grinding or craunching noise. The crunching and ratting of the loose stones. --H. James.
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Crunch \Crunch\, v. t. To crush with the teeth; to chew with a grinding noise; to craunch; as, to crunch a biscuit.
From Jargon File (4.2.0, 31 JAN 2000) [jargon]:
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 (15Feb98) [foldoc]:
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 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)