scrunge

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /skɹʌnd͡ʒ/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ʌndʒ

Etymology 1

Noun

scrunge (uncountable)

1. (music, slang, derogatory) An inauthentic form of grunge music.
   • 1996, SPIN, volume 11, number 11, page 24:

     […] Sun to Sun sure gives the current crop of jingle-jangle scrunge bands the kick in the ass they deserve.

Etymology 2

Noun

scrunge (plural scrunges)

1. (tiddlywinks) A shot where the wink enters the pot but bounces out again.

Etymology 3

Probably a corruption of scrounge.

Verb

scrunge (third-person singular simple present scrunges, present participle scrunging, simple past and past participle scrunged)

1. To scour (search) desperately for resources such as food or equipment.
   • 1926, The Bookman - Volume 64, page 43:

     For myself, I scrunged a lift in a handsome car to Swiss Cottage and proceeded to buy a camp bed, which, owing to strike demands, Selfridge's were unable to supply.

   • 1984, Astronomical Microdensitometry Conference:

     I was still at Kitt Peak at the time and I scrunged around to find one.

   • 1999, Frederick Eckman, Linda Wagner-Martin, David Adams, Over West: Selected Writings of Frederick Eckman, page 169:

     In the Fifties — in the far past, let us say — you had to scrunge for money for arts projects, unless you were exceptionally well connected: you courted individual patrons, if you had the knack; you married well, or well enough, as some poets still do; you "did without", you "saved" and then went broke.

   Hey, wait for me while I scrunge the breakroom.

Etymology 4

Possibly a corruption of scrunch.

Verb

scrunge (third-person singular simple present scrunges, present participle scrunging, simple past and past participle scrunged)

1. To squeeze; to scrunch.
   • 1906, Richard Hayes Barry, Sandy from the Sierras, page 172:

     I feels th' coal scrunge as I come down an' the exhaust steam hisses as we strikes.

   • 1949, Frederick Feikema Manfred, The primitive, page 221:

     To bring his head somewhere down near hers, he slid down and scrunged his bony knees to one side and beneath the music rack on the pew ahead.

   • 1984, New York Sportsman - Volumes 13-15, page 44:

     He goes to the back room and scrunges into the corner.

   • 2014, Will Self, Will Self's Collected Fiction - Volume 1:

     The light pattern had been reversed as I was walking over from the hospital and now the vast ziggurat was bathed inbright light, while the bench where the idiot and I scrunged cheese through our teeth was in deep shadow.

   • 2016, Al Miller, Who Is Barton T. Jones?: The Farmer in the Bush, page 118:

     I know there's something bothering you. Your face is all scrunged up and you're pale as a ghost.

   • 2017, Jonathan Gash, The Great California Game:

     We were scrunged up at a small table, at least those of us not dropping folders.

Etymology 5

Blend of scum +‎ grunge.

Noun

scrunge (countable and uncountable, plural scrunges)

1. Scunge; muck; a disgusting and (usually) semiliquid substance.
   • 1992, Echo Heron, Mercy, page 210:

     Taking the nineteen-pound white Persian into her lap, she kissed his nose, then wiped her lips free of any lingering kitty scrunge with the back of her hand.

   • 1994, Donald Lyons, Independent Visions, page 225:

     That store, by the way, like most else in Mala Noche, is a scruffy den of half-glimpsed scrunge.

   • 1997, Miroslav Holub, Shedding Life: Disease, Politics, and Other Human Conditions, page 58:

     In terms of laboratory research, however, a small error must have crept in, because the resulting pig, by its format and its tendency to mess and stench, surpassed even a scientist's gloomiest dreams of a dinosaur submerged in Jurassic scrunge.

2. A scruffy and impoverished individual.
   • 1992, Betty Harper Fussell, Mabel, page 72:

     Other existing films, however, show how funny Mabel could be with Chaplin when she played a scrungy fishwife equal in size and scrunge to his drunken tramp.

   • 2007, Alexander Theroux, Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual, page 546:

     Although she had spent a full decade and a half of her life doing exactly nothing but look for a man, she still had not found one, not one, in any case, that she ever spoke about with approval, having dated mainly parking attendants, bike messengers with rings in their ears, large-ball bowlers, tarot therapists, protohominids, moral bindlestiffs, sad scrunges, strangers on trains, and, the way he got it, more than a man or two in the shadowy doorways of Point Barrios or Tapachula, Guatemala.

Verb

scrunge (third-person singular simple present scrunges, present participle scrunging, simple past and past participle scrunged)

1. To make or become scrungy.
   • 1976, Mary Anderson, F*T*C Superstar, page 125:

     Can ' t get my million - dollar paws scrunged up .

   • 2007, Charles Hyatt, When Me Was a Boy, page 100:

     Yu'know scrunge up like when rain wet them up.

   • 2017, Cathy Penman, A Widow's Words, page 496:

     You were very fussy about books not getting 'scrunged'. If a book had an even slightly damaged or tatty cover, you wouldn't buy it.