thunk

Meanings

Verb

• Past participle of think
• To strike against something, without breakage, making a "thunk" sound.
• To delay (a computation).
• To execute (code) by means of a thunk.

Noun

• A delayed computation.
• In the Scheme programming language, a function or procedure taking no arguments.
• A specialized subroutine that one software module uses to execute code in another module.

Origin

• By analogy with past tenses and past participles ending in "-unk", such as drunk and sunk.
• Said by the inventors to be from the irregular jocular past tense of think (see Etymology 1), being coined when they realised that the type of an argument in ALGOL 60 could be predetermined at compile time (with a little compile-time “thought”).