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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

thunk.

Representing the dull sound of the impact of a heavy object striking another and coming to an immediate standstill, with neither object being broken by the impact.

5 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

intj/θʌŋk/
  1. Representing the dull sound of the impact of a heavy object striking another and coming to an immediate standstill, with neither object being broken by the impact.

Where this word comes from

Onomatopoeic.

verb/θʌŋk/
  1. To strike against something, without breakage, making a "thunk" sound.

    I was thunked on the head by his stick.
Where this word comes from

Onomatopoeic.

noun/θʌŋk/
  1. A delayed computation.

  2. In the Scheme programming language, a function or procedure taking no arguments.

  3. A specialized subroutine that one software module uses to execute code in another module.

Where this word comes from

Said by the inventors to be from the irregular jocular past tense of think (see Etymology 1), being coined when they realised that the type of an argument in ALGOL 60 could be predetermined at compile time (with a little compile-time “thought”).

verb/θʌŋk/
  1. To delay (a computation).

    transitive
  2. To execute (code) by means of a thunk.

    transitive
Where this word comes from

Said by the inventors to be from the irregular jocular past tense of think (see Etymology 1), being coined when they realised that the type of an argument in ALGOL 60 could be predetermined at compile time (with a little compile-time “thought”).

verb/θʌŋk/
  1. past participle of think

    form-of · humorous · nonstandard · participle · past
    Who would have thunk those guys would have a problem with a little lie?
    A skunk sat on a stump and thunk the stump stunk, but the stump thunk that the skunk stunk.
Where this word comes from

By analogy with past participles ending in "-unk", such as drunk and sunk.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.