Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun See moong.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Bot.) Green gram, a kind of legume (pulse) (Vigna radiata syn. Phaseolus aureus, syn. Phaseolus Mungo), grown for food in British India; called also gram, mung bean, Chinese mung bean, and green-seeded mung bean. It is an erect, bushy annual producing edible green or yellow seeds, and edible pods and young sprouts.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb computing To make repeated changes to a file or data which individually may be reversible, yet which ultimately result in an unintentional irreversible destruction of large portions of the original data.
  • verb by extension to destroy
  • noun A type of small bean.
  • noun A type of plant cultivated for its sprouts Vigna radiata or Phaseolus aureus.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun erect bushy annual widely cultivated in warm regions of India and Indonesia and United States for forage and especially its edible seeds; chief source of bean sprouts used in Chinese cookery; sometimes placed in genus Phaseolus

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Possibly from Mash Until No Good, or a self referencing acronym, Mung Until No Good. Rumored to have originated from one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer groups in the 1970s or 1980s.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Hindi

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Examples

Comments

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  • Wow. I looked all over the place for a definition that would merit John's using this term as a synonym for "gunk," and finally had to go look it up in the OED.

    To me, "mung" is just a kind of plant that you get mung bean sprouts from. I kind of like them, even though they're really not made of anything. It's like eating crispy air, though not as crispy air as rice cakes.

    October 26, 2007

  • 'Chicken feed'. Is that close enough for you C_B?

    July 31, 2008

  • Not sure what you're asking... 'is "chicken feed" close to gunk,' perhaps? If so, I'd say no. I think of bits of dried corn when I think of chicken feed. Or nice crunchy beetles.

    July 31, 2008

  • This is also used in computer culture. It appears in the hacker's dictionary. It is a recursive acronym standing for mung until not good. I can mean playing with code or electronics until they break or making something in a very quick and dirty way. I'll just mung something up.

    June 11, 2009

  • Dictionary.com gives "/muhng/ vt. (in 1960 at MIT, `Mash Until No Good'; sometime after that the derivation from the recursive acronym `Mung Until No Good' became standard; but see munge)

    1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and irrevocable changes."

    July 20, 2009

  • "Only a very small number of 'Dear Rich Bastard' missives actually went out, rather than the 2,000 stated in tellings of this event. (There weren't that many munged entries in the database, after all).

    - Barbara Mikkelson, Dear Rich Bastard, snopes.com, cited 17 Sep 2009.

    September 17, 2009