Word.ws English Dictionary

gronk

gronk noun: an unintelligent and callous person.

Noun (1)

gronk (plural gronks)

  1. (Australia, derogatory, informal) An unintelligent and callous person.

Verb (1)

gronk (third-person singular simple present gronks, present participle gronking, simple past and past participle gronked)

  1. (intransitive, slang) Of a floppy disk drive: to produce mechanical sounds of operation.
    • They say a good detective always starts at the beginning, so I installed the program on my VGA PC's hard drive. As the computer gronked away, copying six 5¼-inch floppies, I wondered why, if bad detectives start at the end, […]1990, Compute, volume 12, numbers 1-5, page 62
    • […] a disk drive gronked, her screen bloomed, and suddenly there was an icon in the upper right corner.1993, Iris Forrest, Computer Tales of Fact and Fantasy
  2. (intransitive, rare, slang) To fail; to crash or go wrong.
    • Repeats the last 40 lines of IRC output, in case your terminal gronked.1992, Charlottesville Computer Users' Group: CCUG
    • The other faction centered on […] what went on under the [model railway] layout. This was The System, […] and it was constantly being improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes "gronked"—in club jargon, screwed up.2010, Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (25th Anniversary Edition)

Noun (2)

gronk (plural gronks)

  1. The cry of a raven.
    • Silence rang in my ears, punctuated by the occasional gronk of the ravens, as they flitted about in the spruce trees.2006, Terrence Rundle West, Run of the Town, page 153
    • Her call elicited an annoyed gronk above her head, and she looked up to see a raven lifting off the cliff face.2010, Diane Lee Wilson, Raven Speak, page 6
    Synonyms:
    quork
  2. A mating call of the Albert's lyrebird.
    • We then viewed the audio spectrogram...and measured the timing of each gronk.2024, Fiona Backhouse, Justin A. Welbergen, Bryce W. Robinson and Anastasia H. Dalziell, “Performative Manipulation of the Environment by Displaying Albert’s Lyrebirds”, in The American Naturalist...
  3. (UK, slang) A British Rail Class 08 shunter locomotive, or similar shunters.

Verb (2)

gronk (third-person singular simple present gronks, present participle gronking, simple past and past participle gronked)

  1. To make a gronking sound.
    • A raven gronked along the timber-covered ridge line, and a cool breeze swept down from the snow-covered peaks.2001, G. Stewart Nash, The Last Three Hundred Miles, page 96
    • Juan Bautista handed the raven off to a perch—it gronked and protested—and took a seat on his couch.2007, Kage Baker, The Graveyard Game, page 34
    Synonyms:
    quork

Proper noun capitalized: Gronk

Gronk

  1. (diminutive) Diminutive of Gronkowski.

Noun (3) capitalized: Gronk

Gronk (plural Gronks)

  1. (UK) A British Rail Class 09 locomotive.

Examples of gronk in a sentence

  • So, you hear a lot of pathetic gronking and grakking until the computer gives up […]1994, Bryan Pfaffenberger, I Hate PCs:
  • My raven launched himself into the dark above with a gronk of amusement.2021, David Reed, Raven Queen, Rise, unnumbered page:
  • The rush of water behind me, the soft drip from the trees, ravens gronking far off—these were the only sounds I heard.2017, Robert Michael Pyle, Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, unnumbered page:

Synonyms of gronk

Forms of gronk

Noun
pluralgronks
pluralGronks
Verb
third-person singular presentgronks
present participlegronking
past participlegronked
pastgronked

Origin of gronk

Imitative.

Onomatopoeic

Questions about gronk

What does gronk mean?
Gronk means an unintelligent and callous person.
How do you use gronk in a sentence?
So, you hear a lot of pathetic gronking and grakking until the computer gives up […]
What part of speech is gronk?
Gronk can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
What is the plural of gronk?
The plural of gronk is gronks.

Words near gronk in the dictionary

  1. Gronewolds
  2. Grong
  3. Grong Grong
  4. groning
  5. Groningen
  6. gronk
  7. gronked
  8. gronking
  9. Gronkow
  10. Gronkowski
  11. gronks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gronk (page history and authors); Gronk (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.

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Cite this entry: “gronk.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gronk. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.