chunk
English
Etymology
Variant of chuck; or alternatively a diminutive of chump (“chunk; block”) + *-k (diminutive suffix) (compare hunk from hump, etc.).
Pronunciation
Noun
chunk (plural chunks)
- A part of something that has been separated.
- The statue broke into chunks.
- 1910, Jack London, Burning Daylight:
- 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.
- A representative portion of a substance, often large and irregular.
- a chunk of granite
- (linguistics, education) A sequence of two or more words that occur in language with high frequency but are not idiomatic; a bundle or cluster.
- examples of chunks would include "in accordance with", "the results of", and "so far"
- (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.
- 1994, Paul J Perry, Multimedia developer's guide
- (comedy) A segment of a comedian's performance
Translations
a part of something
|
a representative of substance
a discrete segment of stream
See also
Further reading
- “chunk”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
- “chunk”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →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 chunks 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.
Derived terms
Categories:
- English terms suffixed with -kin
- English 1-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio links
- Rhymes:English/ʌŋk
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English terms with quotations
- en:Linguistics
- en:Education
- en:Computing
- en:Comedy
- English verbs
- English transitive verbs
- English slang
- Southern US English