crunch
     n 1: the sound of something crunching; "he heard the crunch of
          footsteps on the gravel path"
     2: a critical situation that arises because of a shortage (as a
        shortage of time or money or resources); "an end-of-the
        year crunch"; "a financial crunch"
     3: the act of crushing [syn: {crush}, {compaction}]
     v 1: make crunching noises; "his shoes were crunching on the
          gravel" [syn: {scranch}, {scraunch}, {crackle}]
     2: press or grind with a crunching noise [syn: {cranch}, {craunch},
         {grind}]
     3: chew noisily; "The children crunched the celery sticks"
        [syn: {munch}]
     4: reduce to small pieces or particles by pounding or abrading;
        "grind the spices in a mortar"; "mash the garlic" [syn: {grind},
         {mash}, {bray}, {comminute}]
Source: WordNet® 2.0

crunch 1. vi. To process, usually in a time-consuming or complicated
   way. Connotes an essentially trivial operation that is nonetheless
   painful to perform. The pain may be due to the triviality's being
   embedded in a loop from 1 to 1,000,000,000. "FORTRAN programs do mostly
   {number-crunching}." 2. vt. To reduce the size of a file by a
   complicated scheme that produces bit configurations completely unrelated
   to the original data, such as by a Huffman code. (The file ends up
   looking something like a paper document would if somebody crunched the
   paper into a wad.) Since such compression usually takes more
   computations than simpler methods such as run-length encoding, the term
   is doubly appropriate. (This meaning is usually used in the construction
   `file crunch(ing)' to distinguish it from {number-crunching}.) See
   {compress}. 3. n. The character `#'. Used at XEROX and CMU, among other
   places. See {{ASCII}}. 4. vt. To squeeze program source into a
   minimum-size representation that will still compile or execute. The term
   came into being specifically for a famous program on the BBC micro that
   crunched BASIC source in order to make it run more quickly (it was a
   wholly interpretive BASIC, so the number of characters mattered).
   {Obfuscated C Contest} entries are often crunched; see the first example
   under that entry.


Source: The Jargon File