snarf

English

Etymology

Probably of imitative origin. Alternatively, perhaps a blend of snack +‎ scarf or snort +‎ scarf. First attested in 1963.

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.
   • 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.

   I snarfed a bunch of freebies from the vendor's booth when he wasn't looking.

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

• snarfer
• snarfing
• snarfle

 

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