snarf

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to navigation Jump to search

English

[edit]

Etymology

[edit]

Probably of imitative origin. Alternatively, perhaps a blend of snack +‎ scarf or snort +‎ scarf. First attested in 1963.[1][2][3]

Pronunciation

[edit]

Verb

[edit]

snarf (third-person singular simple present snarfs, present participle snarfing, simple past and past participle snarfed)

  1. (transitive, slang) To eat or consume greedily.
    He snarfed a whole bag of chips in a couple of minutes!
    • 1999, Marya Hornbacker, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, page 239:
      Freed from the usual inhibitions, we get home and I snarf down pasta salad right out of the Tupperware container []
    • 2000, Nancy Woodruff, Someone Else's Child, page 40:
      "I'm not going to sit there while you two watch me snarf a whole pie by myself."
    • 2003, Allen D. Berrien, Powerboat Care and Repair: How to Keep Your Outboard, Sterndrive, Or Gas-Inboard Boat Alive and Well, page 41:
      The old 40-horse models used to snarf up more fuel than today's 90-horse models.
  2. (transitive, slang) To take something by dubious means, but without the connotations of stealing; to take something without regard to etiquette.
    • 1982 December 11, Andrea Loewenstein, “The Joys of Community or Holiday-itis Strikes Back”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 21, page 12:
      As the two friends [] exited the door, they noticed two businesses, quick to snarf up the growing gay market in holiday spendingg, had pinned up notices.
    I snarfed a bunch of freebies from the vendor's booth when he wasn't looking.
  3. (transitive, slang, computing) To slurp (computing slang sense); to load in entirely; to copy as a whole.
    I snarfed the whole database into my program.
  4. (transitive, slang, computing, by extension) To fetch (in general).
    • 1995, Tom Shanley, Don Anderson, ISA System Architecture, page 296:
      Either write-through or write-back policy caches may snarf the data that the bus master is writing to memory.
    • 1996, Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, page 399:
      ...in addition, the embedding enables the designer to snarf features from the underlying language []
    • 2001: Brad A. Myers, Choon Hong Peck, Jeffrey Nicols, Dave Kong, and Robert Miller, Interacting at a Distance Using Semantic Snarfing, in Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pages 305-314.
      Other future applications of the semantic snarfing idea might include classrooms, where students might snarf interesting pieces of content from the instructor's presentation; []

Derived terms

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ snarf”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
  2. ^ snarf, v.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.
  3. ^ snarf”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.

Anagrams

[edit]