Mung
//mʌŋ// noun, verb, slang
noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 mung bean (Vigna radiata, syn. Phaseolus aureus), cultivated for its sprouts. countable, uncountable
- 2 seed of the mung bean plant used for food wordnet
- 3 food from the seed of the mung bean plant wordnet
- 4 erect bushy annual widely cultivated in warm regions of India and Indonesia and United States for forage and especially its edible seeds; chief source of bean sprouts used in Chinese cookery; sometimes placed in genus Phaseolus wordnet
- 5 seed of the mung bean plant; used for food wordnet
Verb
- 1 To make repeated changes to a file or data which individually may be reversible, yet which ultimately result in an unintentional irreversible destruction of large portions of the original data. informal
- 2 To harm, to damage; to destroy. broadly, informal
Example
More examples"Japan’s "yōkan" is a dessert made of sweetened mung beans."
Etymology
Etymology 1
From Hindi मूँग (mūṅg), from Sanskrit मुद्ग (mudga).
Etymology 2
Often doubtfully explained as mash until no good, or a self-referencing (recursive) acronym, mung until no good. Rumored to have originated from one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer groups in the 1970s or 1980s. Potentially related to mangle.
Related phrases
More for "mung"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.