Etymology

thunk

T1H4U1N1K5

Today it means: 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. Full definition →

Ask AI about its historyChatGPTClaudePerplexityGoogle AIGrok

thunk · verb1

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

thunk · interjection, verb2

Onomatopoeic.

thunk · noun, verb3

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”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.