Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To throw or place heavily or abruptly: plunked the money down on the counter.
- v. To strum or pluck (a stringed instrument).
- v. To drop or fall abruptly or heavily; plump: plunked onto the couch with a sigh of relief.
- v. To emit a hollow twanging sound.
- n. Informal A heavy blow or stroke.
- n. A short hollow twanging sound.
- adv. Informal With a short hollow thud.
- adv. Informal Exactly; precisely: The dart landed plunk in the center of the target.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To strike suddenly, with a dull sound; knock; bang: as, they plunked him with stones.
- To knock (away); knock (from).
- To shoot; fill full of ‘lead’ (missiles).
- To pluck (a stringed instrument) so as to produce a low or deep sound; in general, twang.
- To make or emit an abrupt and usually heavy sound: especially used of the rough sounding of a stringed instrument, and sometimes strung out with arbitrary variations (as in the quotation).
- To croak or cry as a raven.
- To plunge or drop down abruptly.
- n. A hard, dull blow: as, to hit one a plunk.
- n. A twang; a twanging sound: as, the plunk-plunk of the banjo.
- n. A dollar.
- Suddenly; plump: as, he came plunk against the half-open door.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To pluck and release quickly (a musical string); to twang.
- v. To throw, push, drive heavily, plumply, or suddenly; ; also, to hit or strike.
- v. To be a truant from (school).
- v. To make a quick, hollow, metallic, or harsh sound, as by pulling hard on a taut string and quickly releasing it; of a raven, to croak.
- v. To drop or sink down suddenly or heavily; to plump.
- v. To play truant, or “hooky”.
- n. Act or sound of plunking.
- n. A large sum of money.
- n. A dollar.
WordNet 3.0
- v. make or move along with a sound as of a horse's hooves striking the ground
- n. a hollow twanging sound
- v. drop steeply
- adv. with a short hollow thud
- n. (baseball) hitting a baseball so that it drops suddenly
- v. pull lightly but sharply with a plucking motion
- v. set (something or oneself) down with or as if with a noise
Etymologies
- Imitative.
Examples
“And cash it was made, thirty plunks (a plunk is a dollar, my dear Anak), and”
“And cash it was made, thirty PLUNKS (a plunk is a dollar, my dear Anak), and”
“And cash it was made, thirty PLUNKS (a plunk is a dollar, my dear Anak), and I pulled my freight.”
“Every desk has a stapler and everyone has had that oddly hollow feeling when they push down on it and get that hollow "plunk" of an empty chamber.”
Marc Hershon: Eight White Elephants: Re-Gifting at the Holiday Office Party
“You are seeing some time laps of tinker-toy-type construction that goes on up there, as they use the robot arms to just kind of plunk it right on.”
“The fiord, by my recollection, is never more than a mile or a mile and a half wide at the utmost, and we came "plunk" up against the head of this fiord with a 3650-foot cliff, which we scaled, and tried to make our charts or cross observations from the top.”
“They heard the dull "plunk" of his sinker as he flung it into a deep, still pool.”
“For a time no sound was heard save the dull "plunk" of sinkers as the lines, one by one, were flung into the water.”
“After dinner they would sit together on the veranda, watching the moon rise over the rim of that wonderful valley, listening to the tree-toads in noisy convention or hearkening to the "plunk" of a trout leaping in the river below.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘plunk’.
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Onomatopoetic
words (seemingly) formed in imitation of a natural sound
plash, guff, woof, splash, crash, pow, crack, bang, whoosh, whizz, whallop, fizz and 116 more...
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Sounds
words that describe sound
atchoo, atishoo, babble, bam, bay, beep, blast, blather, bleat, bleep, blip, bong and 241 more...
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onomatopoeias (1 syllable)
1 syllable words that mean what they sound like. (dictionaried or un-dictionaried words | onomatopoeic in nature)
onomatopoeias (2 syllable) | onomatopoeias (3+ syllables)gush, buzz, pop, woof, boo, bam, bang, bash, bump, clang, clap, click and 86 more...
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Sounds
Shhh! Listen! Did you hear that?
tintinnabulous, susurration, ululation, pandemonium, keening, tinkle, clang, caterwaul, twangle, twank, din, rumble and 34 more...

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