crunk
/kɹʌŋk/
crunk adjective: crazy and intoxicated. Also the simple past and past participle of crank.
Adjective
crunk (comparative crunker, superlative crunkest)
- Crazy and intoxicated.
- Get crunk, who u wit’?1997, Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, Who U Wit, on Get Crunk, Who U Wit: Da Album
- 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?2002, Ashanti, Foolish/Unfoolish page 34
Noun
crunk (uncountable)
- A type of hip hop that originated in the southern United States.
- 2004, Crunk Classics [audio CD compilation title] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00029RT1M/
- 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...2005, Michael Joseph Corcoran, All Over the Map page 25
Verb
crunk (third-person singular simple present crunks, present participle crunking, simple past and past participle crunked)
Proper noun capitalized: Crunk
Crunk (plural Crunks)
- A surname.
Also used as
crunk is also the simple past and past participle of crank.
Examples of crunk in a sentence
- On Slanguistics, a special on the MTV2 cable network, Andre 3000 offered a succinct analogy for crunk.2005, Tamara Palmer, Country Fried Soul, page 17:
- Use a “crunk” song for his cell-phone ring.2005, David Katz, Things a Man Should Never Do Past 30, page 27:
Forms of crunk
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | crunker |
| superlative | crunkest |
| alternative form | krunk |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | crunks |
| present participle | crunking |
| past participle | crunked |
| past | crunked |
| Proper noun | |
| plural | Crunks |
Origin of crunk
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”. 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. 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.
Uncertain. Compare Icelandic krunka (“to croak”), English cronk (“the honk of a goose”).
Germanic ablaut formation.
Words formed from crunk
Words that rhyme with crunk
Questions about crunk
- What does crunk mean?
- Crunk means crazy and intoxicated.
- How do you use crunk in a sentence?
- On Slanguistics, a special on the MTV2 cable network, Andre 3000 offered a succinct analogy for crunk.
- What part of speech is crunk?
- Crunk can be an adjective, a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce crunk?
- Crunk is pronounced /kɹʌŋk/.
Words near crunk in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: crunk (page history and authors); Crunk (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-crunk.ogg.
Cite this entry: “crunk.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crunk. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.