Like the word manger (the name of a place where animals eat, especially at Christmas), and like the word mange (the name of a disease caused by parasites eating an animal’s skin), the word munch probably derives from the French manger, meaning to eat. The word appeared in English in the late fourteenth century, followed about five hundred years later\u2014in the early twentieth century\u2014by munchies, a snack eaten for lack of anything better to do. Somewhat similar in form and sense to munch is scranch, a word that appeared in the early seventeenth century meaning to chew noisily. However, scranch is not related to munch, deriving instead from the Dutch schranzen, meaning to eat voraciously. Although scranch itself is no longer commonly used, several of the words it gave rise to are still current, including scrunch (as in, “He scrunched up his face”) and crunch (as in Captain Crunch).<\/p>\n
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Like the word manger (the name of a place where animals eat, especially at Christmas), and like the word mange (the name of a disease caused by parasites eating an animal’s skin), the word munch probably derives from the French manger, meaning to eat. The word appeared in English in the late fourteenth century, followed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-m"],"yoast_head":"\n