Crunch

How to spell crunch

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crunch

What does crunch mean?

1. verbTo crush something hard or brittle with a noisy, grinding sound, or to move over such a surface noisily.
2. nounA loud grinding sound of crushing, or a critical moment of severe pressure or shortage.

Crunch in a sentence

• verb

  The boots crunch over the frosted gravel path each morning.

• noun

  The cash flow crunch forced the company to delay every payment.

• verb

  She likes to crunch the ice left at the bottom of her drink.

• noun

  There was a satisfying crunch as the apple split between her teeth.

Where does crunch come from?

Language of origin: Other

Crunch is an imitative, or echoic, word: its very sound mimics the noisy action it names, much like 'crush' and 'munch'. It began in the early 1800s as an alteration of the older 'craunch' and 'cranch', verbs recorded in the 1600s that likewise tried to capture the gritty noise of teeth or feet pressing on something hard. The shift from 'craunch' to 'crunch' tightened the vowel and gave the word the sharper, more clipped feel that English speakers seem to prefer for sudden noises. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it broadened figuratively, so that a 'crunch' could mean a moment of decisive pressure, as in 'when it comes to the crunch', and later the financial 'credit crunch'. Because the word is built straight from sound rather than from a Latin or Greek root, its spelling is refreshingly phonetic and rarely trips writers up.

How the word is built

• crunch (echoic root imitating a crushing sound); no prefix or suffix