scrunge

1. derogatoryslanguncountableentertainmentAn inauthentic form of grunge music.

   […] Sun to Sun sure gives the current crop of jingle-jangle scrunge bands the kick in the ass they deserve.

   1996, SPIN, volume 11, number 11, page 24

plural scrunges

1. tiddlywinksA shot where the wink enters the pot but bounces out again.

present singular third person scrunges · participle present scrunging · participle past scrunged · past scrunged

1. To scour (search) desperately for resources such as food or equipment.

   Hey, wait for me while I scrunge the breakroom.

   3 more examples

   For myself, I scrunged a lift in a handsome car to Swiss Cottage and proceeded to buy a camp bed, which, owing to strike demands, Selfridge's were unable to supply.

   1926, The Bookman - Volume 64, page 43

   I was still at Kitt Peak at the time and I scrunged around to find one.

   1984, Astronomical Microdensitometry Conference

   In the Fifties — in the far past, let us say — you had to scrunge for money for arts projects, unless you were exceptionally well connected: you courted individual patrons, if you had the knack; you married well, or well enough, as some poets still do; you "did without", you "saved" and then went broke.

   1999, Frederick Eckman, Linda Wagner-Martin, David Adams, Over West: Selected Writings of Frederick Eckman, page 169

present singular third person scrunges · participle present scrunging · participle past scrunged · past scrunged

1. To squeeze; to scrunch.

   He goes to the back room and scrunges into the corner.

   1984, New York Sportsman - Volumes 13-15, page 44

   5 more examples

   I feels th' coal scrunge as I come down an' the exhaust steam hisses as we strikes.

   1906, Richard Hayes Barry, Sandy from the Sierras, page 172

   To bring his head somewhere down near hers, he slid down and scrunged his bony knees to one side and beneath the music rack on the pew ahead.

   1949, Frederick Feikema Manfred, The primitive, page 221

   The light pattern had been reversed as I was walking over from the hospital and now the vast ziggurat was bathed inbright light, while the bench where the idiot and I scrunged cheese through our teeth was in deep shadow.

   2014, Will Self, Will Self's Collected Fiction - Volume 1

   I know there's something bothering you. Your face is all scrunged up and you're pale as a ghost.

   2016, Al Miller, Who Is Barton T. Jones?: The Farmer in the Bush, page 118

   We were scrunged up at a small table, at least those of us not dropping folders.

   2017, Jonathan Gash, The Great California Game

plural scrunges

1. countableuncountableScunge; muck; a disgusting and (usually) semiliquid substance.

   That store, by the way, like most else in Mala Noche, is a scruffy den of half-glimpsed scrunge.

   1994, Donald Lyons, Independent Visions, page 225

   2 more examples

   Taking the nineteen-pound white Persian into her lap, she kissed his nose, then wiped her lips free of any lingering kitty scrunge with the back of her hand.

   1992, Echo Heron, Mercy, page 210

   In terms of laboratory research, however, a small error must have crept in, because the resulting pig, by its format and its tendency to mess and stench, surpassed even a scientist's gloomiest dreams of a dinosaur submerged in Jurassic scrunge.

   1997, Miroslav Holub, Shedding Life: Disease, Politics, and Other Human Conditions, page 58

2. countableuncountableA scruffy and impoverished individual.

   Other existing films, however, show how funny Mabel could be with Chaplin when she played a scrungy fishwife equal in size and scrunge to his drunken tramp.

   1992, Betty Harper Fussell, Mabel, page 72

   1 more example

   Although she had spent a full decade and a half of her life doing exactly nothing but look for a man, she still had not found one, not one, in any case, that she ever spoke about with approval, having dated mainly parking attendants, bike messengers with rings in their ears, large-ball bowlers, tarot therapists, protohominids, moral bindlestiffs, sad scrunges, strangers on trains, and, the way he got it, more than a man or two in the shadowy doorways of Point Barrios or Tapachula, Guatemala.

   2007, Alexander Theroux, Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual, page 546

present singular third person scrunges · participle present scrunging · participle past scrunged · past scrunged

1. To make or become scrungy.

   Yu'know scrunge up like when rain wet them up.

   2007, Charles Hyatt, When Me Was a Boy, page 100

   2 more examples

   Can ' t get my million - dollar paws scrunged up .

   1976, Mary Anderson, F*T*C Superstar, page 125

   You were very fussy about books not getting 'scrunged'. If a book had an even slightly damaged or tatty cover, you wouldn't buy it.

   2017, Cathy Penman, A Widow's Words, page 496