Crunch

[kruhnch] /krʌntʃ/

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.
Idioms
10.
crunch numbers, Computers.

/krʌntʃ/
verb
1.
to bite or chew (crisp foods) with a crushing or crackling sound
2.
to make or cause to make a crisp or brittle sound: the snow crunched beneath his feet
noun
3.
the sound or act of crunching
4.
short for abdominal crunch
5.
(informal) the crunch, the critical moment or situation
adjective
6.
(informal) critical; decisive: crunch time
v.

1814, from craunch (1630s), probably of imitative origin. Related: Crunched; crunching. The noun is 1836, from the verb; the sense of “critical moment” was popularized 1939 by Winston Churchill, who had used it in his 1938 biography of Marlborough.

modifier

: : It’s Crunch Time in the Havens

noun

verb

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.
[Jargon File]
(2007-11-12)