Word.ws English Dictionary

zorch

zorch verb: to destroy or ruin, especially by electronic means.

Verb

zorch (third-person singular simple present zorches, present participle zorching, simple past and past participle zorched)

  1. (intransitive, slang, transitive) To destroy or ruin, especially by electronic means.
    • I was well on my way to zorching my GPA as a sophomore and becoming quite the computer hacker when Luis my mentor took me aside. He told me that my grades werent up to snuff when I told him I was getting C's in Spanish (that was my best subject that month).1990 November 30, Jim Burnes, “"ZOG"?”, in alt.conspiracy (Usenet)
    • Assuming you are willing to live with the consequences, which include obliterating everything within a hundred kilometers of your launch site, dumping a hundred tons of fallout into the stratosphere, and zorching every piece of electronics sight^([sic]).2002 April 3, John Schilling, “Interstellar Flight Today”, in rec.arts.sf.science (Usenet)

Noun

zorch (uncountable)

  1. A numerical factor used to limit semantic searches in cognitive modelling.
    • This is done by using a numerical constant, called zorch, to start marker-passing and dividing it by outbranching […]1987, John McDermott, Artificial Intelligence: 10th International Joint Conference, volume 1, page 152
    • […] it and all its first set of descendants can be marked, but the zorch runs out quickly.1989, Noel E. Sharkey, Models of Cognition: A Review of Cognitive Science

Examples of zorch in a sentence

  • […] I probably just wasn't inserting the memory DIMM correctly, not that it was intrinsically unseatable; I zorched the motherboard myself when trying to remove disk drives […]2002 May 20, Timothy A. McDaniel, “ConJose planning”, in rec.arts.sf.fandom (Usenet):
  • Zorching the economy so badly we still haven't dug out two years after he's gone ..2011 July 15, Curt, “First Rule of Liberalism”, in seattle.politics (Usenet):
  • In order to quantify network connectivity between one protein and others, we adapted the idea of zorch originally used to describe cognition (Hendler, 1989).2008, Richard Trent Llewellyn, Annotating the Biological Process of Proteins with Functional Linkages, page 39:

Forms of zorch

third-person singular presentzorches
present participlezorching
past participlezorched
pastzorched

Origin of zorch

Perhaps blend of zap + scorch or torch.

Questions about zorch

What does zorch mean?
Zorch means to destroy or ruin, especially by electronic means.
How do you use zorch in a sentence?
[…] I probably just wasn't inserting the memory DIMM correctly, not that it was intrinsically unseatable; I zorched the motherboard myself when trying to remove disk drives […]
What part of speech is zorch?
Zorch can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of zorch?
The past tense of zorch is zorched.

Words near zorch in the dictionary

  1. zorber
  2. zorbing
  3. zorbonaut
  4. zorbonauts
  5. zorbs
  6. zorch
  7. zorched
  8. zorches
  9. zorching
  10. zorgite
  11. zori

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: zorch (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:

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