crunk

Meanings

Adjective

• Crazy and intoxicated.

Noun

• A type of hip hop that originated in the southern United States.

Verb

• To cry like a crane.

Origin

• 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 (Get Crunk, Who [are] You With[?]: The Album). Various possible origins have been proposed:
• “crazy 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, 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.
• Origin obscure. Compare Icelandic krunka, English cronk.