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chunk
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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See also: Chunk
English
Pronunciation
Etymology 1
Variant of chuck; or alternatively a diminutive of chump (“chunk; block”) + *-k (diminutive suffix) (compare hunk from hump, etc.).
Noun
chunk (plural chunks)
- A part of something that has been separated; a generally squat, thick, irregular piece of something, e.g. wood or stone.
- Synonyms: bit, hunk, lump; see also Thesaurus:piece
- The statue broke into chunks.
- a chunk of granite
- 1910 October, Jack London, Burning Daylight, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC:
- Daylight, between mouthfuls, fed chunks of ice into the tin pot, where it thawed into water. […] Daylight cut up generous chunks of bacon and dropped them in the pot of bubbling beans.
- 1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 224, about Hertingfordbury:
- Until the main road from Hatfield to Hertford was diverted a few years ago, heavy lorries trundling through the village sometimes knocked chunks off corner buildings, but now the village has regained much of its former tranquillity.
- A large or substantial portion of something.
- 2013 February 26, Maryellen Weimer, Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 91:
- I'd be willing to bet a chunk of my retirement that the number hasn't decreased.
- 2015 December 6, Eva Hudson, Shoot First, Two Pies Press:
- […] she'd be willing to bet a chunk of change this would be one of the nicest rooms Kate-Lynn Bowers had ever slept in: it was the sort of place you'd think twice about running away from.
- (linguistics, education) A sequence of two or more words that occur in language with high frequency but are not idiomatic.
- (computing) A discrete segment of a file, stream, etc. (especially one that represents audiovisual media); a block.
- 1994, Paul J Perry, Multimedia developer's guide:
- The first DWORD of a chunk data in the RIFF chunk is a four character code value identifying the form type of the file.
- 2015, Jean-Marc Pierson, Large-scale Distributed Systems and Energy Efficiency: A Holistic View, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 271:
- Each peer downloads the desired file, in chunks, from a multitude of other peers. While downloading missing chunks, peers upload to other peers in the same torrent the chunks they have already obtained.
- (comedy) A segment of a comedian's performance.
- 1994, Gene Perret, Successful Stand-up Comedy: Advice from a Comedy Writer, page 80:
- You begin gathering two hours of dependable comedy by developing that first three-minute chunk. When you're satisfied with it, you create another three minutes of laughs, then another three minutes.
- 2012, Jay Sankey, Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy, page 168:
- If you're gigging outdoors for the Society of Catholic Gardeners, don't close your set with your "Papa Beelzebub" chunk (no matter how life affirming you think it is!).
Derived terms
Translations
a part of something
|
a representative of substance
Further reading
- “chunk”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
- William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “chunk”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.
Verb
chunk (third-person singular simple present chunks, present participle chunking, simple past and past participle chunked)
- (transitive) To break into large pieces or chunks.
- (transitive) To break down (language, etc.) into conceptual pieces of manageable size.
- 2005, Yong Zhao, Research in Technology and Second Language Education:
- These results offer tentative evidence that suggests that certain components of computer-mediated instruction (in this case, access to and control over syntactically chunked, captioned video) are not necessarily beneficial for certain learners […]
- (transitive, slang, chiefly Southern US) To throw.
- Synonyms: chuck, fling, hurl; see also Thesaurus:throw
- 1960, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird:
- Calpurnia said it was hard on Helen, because she had to walk nearly a mile out of her way to availed the Ewells, who, according to Helen, “chunked at her” the first time she tried to use the public road.
- (transitive, video games) Deal a substantial amount of damage to an opponent.
- He's chunked right before the next battle so he has to regen HP.
- (transitive) To remove a chunk from.
- 1899, E. Nesbit, The Story of the Treasure Seekers:
- "Mind you keep very still," he said, "or I might chunk a bit out of you with the spade."
Derived terms
Etymology 2
Noun
chunk (plural chunks)
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