Crunching

How to spell crunching

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crunching

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crunching mean?

1. verbCrushing something hard with a noisy, gritty sound, or processing large amounts of data or figures.

Crunching in a sentence

• The dog was crunching noisily on a bone by the back door.

• She could hear the gravel crunching under the car tyres as they pulled in.

Where does crunching come from?

Language of origin: Other

Crunching is the present participle of the verb 'crunch', which is an imitative or onomatopoeic word: it was coined to mimic the hard, gritty sound of something being crushed between the teeth or underfoot. The earlier English form was 'craunch', recorded from the 1600s, and over time the vowel softened and the spelling settled into 'crunch' by the early nineteenth century. Because the word was built from sound rather than borrowed from another language, it has no neat classical root; its closest relatives are other noisy imitative words like 'crush', 'crack', and 'munch'. In the twentieth century the verb gained a figurative office sense, as in 'crunching numbers', where masses of data are processed rapidly. The spelling is straightforward once you remember the silent-feeling 'tch' is simply '-ch' here, with the regular '-ing' ending added cleanly.

How the word is built

• crunch (imitative root: a hard, crushing sound)
• -ing (present participle suffix)