Meanings
zorch1
present singular third person zorches · participle present zorching · participle past zorched · past zorched
- intransitiveslangtransitiveTo destroy or ruin, especially by electronic means.
Zorching the economy so badly we still haven't dug out two years after he's gone ..
2011 July 15, Curt, “First Rule of Liberalism”, in seattle.politics (Usenet)4 more examples
I was well on my way to zorching my GPA as a sophomore and becoming quite the computer hacker when Luis my mentor took me aside. He told me that my grades werent up to snuff when I told him I was getting C's in Spanish (that was my best subject that month).
1990 November 30, Jim Burnes, “"ZOG"?”, in alt.conspiracy (Usenet)Assuming you are willing to live with the consequences, which include obliterating everything within a hundred kilometers of your launch site, dumping a hundred tons of fallout into the stratosphere, and zorching every piece of electronics sight^([sic]).
2002 April 3, John Schilling, “Interstellar Flight Today”, in rec.arts.sf.science (Usenet)[…] I probably just wasn't inserting the memory DIMM correctly, not that it was intrinsically unseatable; I zorched the motherboard myself when trying to remove disk drives […]
2002 May 20, Timothy A. McDaniel, “ConJose planning”, in rec.arts.sf.fandom (Usenet)But if you're doing disk-to-disk backup you want at least two backup disks, since it's kind of a nightmare if your good disk zorches right in the middle of the backup, giving you a zorched backup disk as well.
2003 May 7, Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr, “AKICIF: Browser bafflement”, in rec.arts.sf.fandom (Usenet)
zorch2
- uncountableA numerical factor used to limit semantic searches in cognitive modelling.
[…] it and all its first set of descendants can be marked, but the zorch runs out quickly.
1989, Noel E. Sharkey, Models of Cognition: A Review of Cognitive Science2 more examples
This is done by using a numerical constant, called zorch, to start marker-passing and dividing it by outbranching […]
1987, John McDermott, Artificial Intelligence: 10th International Joint Conference, volume 1, page 152In order to quantify network connectivity between one protein and others, we adapted the idea of zorch originally used to describe cognition (Hendler, 1989).
2008, Richard Trent Llewellyn, Annotating the Biological Process of Proteins with Functional Linkages, page 39
Origin
Perhaps blend of zap + scorch or torch.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
zorch. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/zorch
“zorch.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/zorch. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “zorch,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/zorch.
Source: zorch on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.