munge

English edit

Variant of mung; likely a misconstructed back-formation from munging, munged or munger.

munge (third-person singular simple present munges, present participle munging, simple past and past participle munged)

(transitive, computing, informal) To transform data in an undefined or unexplained manner, as for example when data wrangling requires nonsystemic or nonsystematic edits.
- 2011, Brian Knight, Ketan Patel, Wayne Snyder, Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Administration:
  As a part of the code review with the development team, notify them that you want to have these options as a part of the installation script, rather than you munging the installation scripts during deployment.
(transitive, computing, informal) To add a spamblock to (an email address).
- 1998, Alan Schwartz, Simson Garfinkel, Stopping spam:
  Munging is effective — it prevents unwanted email from reaching you by keeping your real email address out of the clutches of the address-harvesting programs.
(transitive, genealogy, informal) To corrupt a record about an individual by erroneously merging in information about another individual.
It looks like this record is munged—it has this person's birth date, but his father's death date

transform data in an undefined/unexplained manner

munge