crunchy

English

Etymology

From crunch +‎ -y. The slang sense is derived from the concept of crunchy granola.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈkɹʌnt͡ʃi/

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ʌntʃi

Adjective

crunchy (comparative crunchier, superlative crunchiest)

1. Likely to crunch, especially with reference to food when it is eaten.

   Synonym: crispy

   I put some lettuce in the burger to make it more crunchy.

   • 1969 November 23, “Crunchy Frog”, in Monty Python's Flying Circus, season 1, episode 6:

     Inspector: Well, don't you even take the bones out?
     Mr. Hilton: If we took the bones out, it wouldn't be crunchy, would it?

2. (figurative, slang) Having counter-culture sensibilities; nature-loving or hippie; wholesome.

   San Francisco was a very crunchy town.

   Silky mama won't typically go for cloth diapers like crunchy mama.

   • 2022 November 10, Lauren Cochrane, quoting Jonah Weiner, “‘Cool kids want to dress like old crunchy people’: the fashion newsletter where wholesome is hip”, in The Guardian‎^[1], →ISSN:

     Weiner says being in Oakland “allows you to encounter different ideas” in terms of style “like crunchy, old people in the organic produce section of the grocery store, wearing very Bay Area specific outfits”.

   • 2022 December 14, Kathleen Belew, “The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline”, in The Atlantic‎^[2]:

     The pipeline is real; individual people are indeed being recruited into the militant right. Some of them make this journey through “crunchy” online spaces into white-power content, as the sociologist Cynthia Miller-Idriss has documented in Hate in the Homeland.

3. (music, informal) Of a chord, containing dissonant intervals.
4. (informal) Of an image, pixelated, grainy, or exhibiting blocking, often as a result of oversharpening, a low resolution, or aggressively applied lossy image compression.
   • 2007, Trish Meyer, Chris Meyer, After Effects Apprentice: Real-world Skills for the Aspiring Motion Graphics Artist, Taylor & Francis, →ISBN:

     This can result in the image looking very crunchy as pixels are skipped - especially if you choose the "Fit" option in the Magnification popup. Don't panic; your final image won't look that bad […]

   • 2009 September 25, Bruce Fraser, Jeff Schewe, Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom, Peachpit Press, →ISBN:

     […] pixels that look hideous on screen to a printing device. But if the pixels don't look seriously crunchy on the display, you're almost certainly undersharpening your images. The only reliable way to evaluate print sharpening is to […]

Derived terms

• crunchily
• crunchiness
• crunchy-gravel drama
• crunchy mama
• crunchy mom
• crunchy roll

 

Translations

likely to crunch

• Belarusian: хрусткі (xrustki)
• Bikol Central: maragsip
• Catalan: cruixent
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 脆 (zh) (cuì)

• Esperanto: krakmaĉa
• Finnish: rapea (fi)
• French: croquant (fr)
• Galician: crocante, triscante
• German: knusprig (de)
• Greek: τραγανιστός (el) (traganistós)
• Hungarian: ropogós (hu)
• Italian: croccante (it) m
• Malay: rangup
• Maori: kakukaku
• Norwegian: knasende

  Nynorsk: krasete, knasande, sprø

• Polish: chrupki m, kruchy (pl) m
• Portuguese: crocante (pt)
• Romanian: crocant (ro) m or n
• Russian: хрустя́щий (ru) (xrustjáščij)
• Spanish: crujiente (es), crocante (es)
• Swedish: krispig (sv), knaprig (sv)
• Turkish: gevrek (tr), kıtır (tr), kıtır kıtır (tr), çıtır, çıtır çıtır (tr)
• Ukrainian: хрумкий (xrumkyj), хрусткий (xrustkyj)
• Welsh: creisionllyd

Noun

crunchy (plural crunchies)

1. (usually in the plural) A pellet of dry cat food.
   • 2008, Bev Cooke, Feral, →ISBN, page 147:

     Finally she paws a crunchy out of the bowl, bends her head, [and] eats it.

   • 2013, Sharon Lee, Steve Miller, Fledgling, Second Edition, →ISBN:

     He picked a single crunchy up in his mouth and munched it consideringly.

2. (military slang) An infantryman, as opposed to a tanker (combatant manning a tank).
   • 2009, James Wesley Rawles, Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse:

     "Inside, tankers carry full-length M16s for crew protection from crunchies."

   • 2009, Chris Bunch, Allan cole, A Reckoning For Kings: A Novel of Vietnam:

     Since tankers are no brighter than infantry types, those men assigned to the Twelfth Infantry Division's armored unit thought their tour was a bitter waste, rather than being grateful for not getting wiped out nearly as regularly as the crunchies did.

See also

• crunchie (“chocolate sweet; infantry soldier; white Afrikaner”)

References

• 2005, Mark Galer, Les Horvat, Digital Imaging, Taylor & Francis, →ISBN:

  [An] image may look rather 'spotty' when viewed at 100% magnification with occasional pixels looking out of place tonally. (The term 'crunchy' is sometimes used as the effect on tones is somewhat like the difference between crunchy and smooth peanut butter.) This is quite normal and will not show in the final output - but it is obvious that this level of sharpening is not appropriate for all conditions.