Join free

thunk

English

AI In plain words

Writing a short explanation…

Written by a house AI from the entry below, in your language. The entry itself is the source.

thunk¹

  • /θʌŋk/

Rhymes with -ʌŋk

Where it comes from

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

verb

  1. humorous, nonstandard, participle, past past participle of think Who would have thunk those guys would have a problem with a little lie?

thunk²

  • /θʌŋk/

Rhymes with -ʌŋk

Where it comes from

Onomatopoeic.

interjection

  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.

verb thunks · thunking · thunked

  1. To strike against something, without breakage, making a "thunk" sound. I was thunked on the head by his stick.

thunk³

  • /θʌŋk/

Rhymes with -ʌŋk

Where it 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”).

noun thunks

  1. A delayed computation. Not surprisingly, a thunk is more expensive to store than a single number[…].
  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. If the provider of these DLLs has not updated the code to a 32-bit environment, you will have to switch to a new 32-bit library or write thunks between your 32-bit code and the 16-bit DLL.

verb thunks · thunking · thunked

  1. transitive To delay (a computation). Not surprisingly, a thunk is more expensive to store than a single number, and the more complex the thunked expression, the more space it needs. For something cheap such as arithmetic, thunking an expression is more computationally expensive than calculating it immediately.
  2. transitive To execute (code) by means of a thunk. This efficiency is offset by the fact that some of the calls made by Win32 apps must now be thunked down to 16 bits, something that isn't necessary in Windows NT and OS/2.

Talk about this word

Cite this
MLA

"thunk." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/thunk. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026.

APA

thunk. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/thunk

Chicago

"thunk." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/thunk.

BibTeX
@misc{thunk_2026,
  title = {thunk},
  howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://micwyn.com/word/thunk},
  urldate = {2026-11-06}
}