snarf

English

Etymology

Probably of imitative origin. Alternatively, perhaps a blend of snack +‎ scarf or snort +‎ scarf. First attested in 1963.[1][2][3]

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /snɑː(ɹ)f/
  • Audio (General Australian):(file)

Verb

snarf (third-person singular simple present snarfs, present participle snarfing, simple past and past participle snarfed)

  1. (transitive, slang) To eat or consume greedily.
    He snarfed a whole bag of chips in a couple of minutes!
    • 1999, Marya Hornbacker, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, page 239:
      Freed from the usual inhibitions, we get home and I snarf down pasta salad right out of the Tupperware container […]
    • 2000, Nancy Woodruff, Someone Else's Child, page 40:
      "I'm not going to sit there while you two watch me snarf a whole pie by myself."
    • 2003, Allen D. Berrien, Powerboat Care and Repair: How to Keep Your Outboard, Sterndrive, Or Gas-Inboard Boat Alive and Well, page 41:
      The old 40-horse models used to snarf up more fuel than today's 90-horse models.
  2. (transitive, slang) To take something by dubious means, but without the connotations of stealing; to take something without regard to etiquette.
    I snarfed a bunch of freebies from the vendor's booth when he wasn't looking.
    • 1982 December 11, Andrea Loewenstein, “The Joys of Community or Holiday-itis Strikes Back”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 21, page 12:
      As the two friends […] exited the door, they noticed two businesses, quick to snarf up the growing gay market in holiday spendingg, had pinned up notices.
  3. (transitive, slang, computing) To slurp (computing slang sense); to load in entirely; to copy as a whole.
    I snarfed the whole database into my program.
  4. (transitive, slang, computing, by extension) To fetch (in general).
    • 1995, Tom Shanley, Don Anderson, ISA System Architecture, page 296:
      Either write-through or write-back policy caches may snarf the data that the bus master is writing to memory.
    • 1996, Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, page 399:
      ...in addition, the embedding enables the designer to snarf features from the underlying language […]
    • 2001: Brad A. Myers, Choon Hong Peck, Jeffrey Nicols, Dave Kong, and Robert Miller, Interacting at a Distance Using Semantic Snarfing, in Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pages 305-314.
      Other future applications of the semantic snarfing idea might include classrooms, where students might snarf interesting pieces of content from the instructor's presentation; […]

Derived terms

Translations

References

  1. ^ “snarf”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
  2. ^ “snarf, v.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.
  3. ^ “snarf”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.

Anagrams

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