Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A dull, hollow sound.
  • intransitive verb To make a dull, hollow sound.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb humorous, nonstandard Past participle of think
  • interjection Representing the 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 to strike against something, without breakage, making a "thunk" sound
  • noun computing a delayed computation
  • noun computing In the Scheme programming language, a function or procedure taking no arguments.
  • noun computing a mapping of machine data from one system-specific form to another, usually for compatibility reasons, such as from 16-bit addresses to 32-bit to allow a 16-bit program to run on a 32-bit operating system.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a dull hollow sound

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Imitative.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

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

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Claimed by the inventors to be from the supposed past tense, being coined when they realised after much thought (whence "thunk") that the type of an argument in ALGOL 60 could be predetermined at compile time; not, as is sometimes claimed, from the interjection, being the supposed sound made by data hitting the stack or an accumulator

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Onomatopoeic

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Examples

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  • Another humourously false irregular past participle (see also shat and brung), formed no doubt by analogy to sink - sunk, stink - stunk and drink - drunk. The simple past form thank does not exist, likely because of its use a separate word and the prevalence of thought as past tense even when this spurious participle is used. An argument could be made for a similarly spurious formation in plink - plunk. I could possibly attest to experience of that usage; however, both of those words are onomatopoeic enough that grammatical change between them seems subsidiary (as also in clink - clunk). No ablaut occurs for wink or link (or fink or dink for that matter, but they are a good deal more dialectical).

    December 18, 2010