Snarf

//snɑː(ɹ)f// verb, slang

verb, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To eat or consume greedily. slang, transitive

    "He snarfed a whole bag of chips in a couple of minutes!"

  2. 2
    make off with belongings of others wordnet
  3. 3
    To take something by dubious means, but without the connotations of stealing; to take something without regard to etiquette. slang, transitive

    "I snarfed a bunch of freebies from the vendor's booth when he wasn't looking."

  4. 4
    To slurp (computing slang sense); to load in entirely; to copy as a whole. slang, transitive

    "I snarfed the whole database into my program."

  5. 5
    To fetch (in general). broadly, slang, transitive

    "Either write-through or write-back policy caches may snarf the data that the bus master is writing to memory."

Synonyms

All synonyms
abstractcabbagefilchhookliftnobble

Example

More examples

"He snarfed a whole bag of chips in a couple of minutes!"

Etymology

Probably of imitative origin. Alternatively, perhaps a blend of snack + scarf or snort + scarf. First attested in 1963.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.