Grunch

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To produce a rough, grating grunt or crunch, as when someone or something strains or grinds against resistance
2. Describing the act of emitting a coarse, throaty noise mixed with a grinding sound under strain
3. Making a gruff, crunching sound, often through the teeth or throat, as a result of effort or friction

Etymology: "Grunch" is a verb meaning to grind with effort, and it has a real history in English, though it is a fairly obscure one. It belongs to the family of imitative words that try to capture a sound: the gritty crunching or grinding of teeth, gears, or stones. Its close relatives "crunch" and "scrunch" share the same sound-based character, and English has many words of this kind that were coined by ear rather than inherited from older languages. Dictionaries record it in the sense of grinding or chewing noisily, and the extension to grinding with effort, such as gears forced into place or machinery laboring, follows naturally from that noise.

Synonyms: crunch, grind, gnash