English

A chunk of silicon carbide.

Noun

chunk ‎(plural chunks)

1. A part of something that has been separated.

   The statue broke into chunks.

   • 1910, Jack London, Burning Daylight:

     Daylight, between mouthfuls, fed chunks of ice into the tin pot, where it thawed into water. ... Daylight cut up generous chunks of bacon and dropped them in the pot of bubbling beans.

2. A representative portion of a substance, often large and irregular.

   a chunk of granite

3. (computing) A discrete segment of a file, stream, etc. (especially one that represents audiovisual media); a block.
   • 1994, Paul J Perry, Multimedia developer's guide

     The first DWORD of a chunk data in the RIFF chunk is a four character code value identifying the form type of the file.

Translations

See also

• piece
• bit
• lump
• chuck
• hunk

External links

• chunk in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913
• chunk in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911

Verb

chunk ‎(third-person singular simple present chunks, present participle chunking, simple past and past participle chunked)

1. (transitive) To break into large pieces or chunks.
2. (transitive) To break down (language, etc.) into conceptual chunks of manageable size.
   • 2005, Yong Zhao, Research in Technology and Second Language Education

     These results offer tentative evidence that suggests that certain components of computer-mediated instruction (in this case, access to and control over syntactically chunked, captioned video) are not necessarily beneficial for certain learners […]

3. (transitive, slang, chiefly Southern US) To throw.

See also

• cut into chunks (cooking)