crunk

See also: Crunk

English

Pronunciation

IPA^(key): /kɹʌŋk/
Audio (AU) (file)
Rhymes: -ʌŋk

Etymology 1

Attested in the Southern US since the late 1980s, originally in the sense of “rowdy, high energy out-of-control behavior by a crowd at Southern night clubs”.[1] Popularized by its use in the fusion genre of crunk music in the 1990s and especially early 2000s. In this context, first used in music lyrics and notably popularized by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, on their 1997 debut album Get Crunk, Who U Wit: Da Album (Get Crunk, Who [are] You With[?]: The Album).[2] Various possible origins have been proposed:

Blend of crazy +‎ drunk “crazy drunk”.
Blend of chronic (“marijuana”) +‎ drunk “high on marijuana and drunk (on alcohol) at the same time”.
From a dialectal past tense of crank.

See Crunk: etymology at Wikipedia for further information.

There is no evidence of any connection with Yiddish or German krank (“sick, ill”), nor that it entered the Southern Black vernacular through the presence of European Jewish immigrant shopkeepers in black neighborhoods in cities such as Atlanta; the phonetic similarity of the words is considered a coincidence.[3]

Alternative forms

krunk

Adjective

crunk (comparative crunker, superlative crunkest)

(US, slang) Crazy and intoxicated.
- 1997, Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, Who U Wit, on Get Crunk, Who U Wit: Da Album:
  Get crunk, who u wit’?
- 2002, Ashanti, Foolish/Unfoolish page 34:
  Let me tell you how I like it / If we’re all in a crowd / I like to be the one they single out / Let me tell you how to please me / Can you get it crunk and make my body jump?
- 2009, Kesha, Tik Tok
  I'm talking about everybody getting crunk, crunk
  Boys tryin' to touch my junk, junk
  Gonna smack him if he getting too drunk, drunk

Noun

crunk (uncountable)

A type of hip hop that originated in the southern United States.
- 2004, Crunk Classics [audio CD compilation title]
- 2005, Michael Joseph Corcoran, All Over the Map page 25:
  As Houston rap became a national sensation, spinning off into the “crunk” scene, it was hard to believe that just ten years earlier, the only Texas rap acts of any note were Donald “The D.O.C.” Curry, the Dallasite who hooked up with Dr. Dre and the N.W.A. crew, and the Geto Boys, who set out to make West Coast gangstas come off like Young MC.
- 2005, Tamara Palmer, Country Fried Soul, page 17:
  On Slanguistics, a special on the MTV2 cable network, Andre 3000 offered a succinct analogy for crunk. “What punk was to rock,” he explains, “crunk is to rap.”
- 2005, David Katz, Things a Man Should Never Do Past 30, page 27:
  Use a “crunk” song for his cell-phone ring.

Derived terms

aquacrunk
crunkmeister

Etymology 2

Uncertain. Compare Icelandic krunka (“to croak”), English cronk (“the honk of a goose”).

Verb

crunk (third-person singular simple present crunks, present participle crunking, simple past and past participle crunked)

(intransitive, obsolete) To cry like a crane.
- 1872, Nathaniel James Walter Le Cato, Theodora
  The crunking crane heard high amongst the clouds.

References

Miller, Matt: "Dirty Decade: Rap Music and the U.S. South, 1997-2007".
"Lil Jon crunks up the volume", NY Times, November 28, 2004
See this LanguageLog post for information on the high probability of chance similarity among languages.