Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Deaf.
  • Dull; stupid; slow of understanding.
  • Heavy, as bread; stodgy.
  • noun A stodgy pudding, made of flour, currants, and water.
  • noun Improperly baked bread.
  • To push or jog, as with the elbow; nudge.
  • noun A jog with the elbow; a nudge; a ‘dig in the ribs.’

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A small meal between lunch and dinner in the late afternoon or early evening (about 3-5 p.m.), usually including tea or coffee with cookies, sometimes fruits, a salad or a light sandwich.
  • verb Geordie To knock against; to hit, punch
  • verb Geordie To crash into, to bump into.
  • verb UK To jog, especially with the elbow.
  • noun golf A fat hit from a claggy lie.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

A blend of lunch and dinner (probably in imitation of brunch).

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Origin unknown.

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Examples

  • The same _Typha_ has been further called "Dunse-down," from making persons "dunch," or deaf, if its soft spikes accidentally run into the ears.

    Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure William Thomas Fernie

  • The term "dunch" has enjoyed a wider usage, especially among college students, than its equivalent "linner", which has died out.

    Ghost of a flea 2009

  • A-Rod digging into a late lunch/early dinner (linner? dunch?) with his lawyer at the Palm on Monday afternoon after the Yankees 'visit to the White House.

    Hey, isn't that...?: Rosie Perez, A-Rod, Kal Penn, Erica Jong 2010

  • “Ta deil ding out her Cameronian een — what gies her titles to dunch gentlemans about?”

    The Heart of Mid-Lothian 2007

  • Then we went home and hung out there for a while until my cousin called to take us to lunch (linner? dunch?) at the Weathervane at A Southern Season.

    brynpobydd Diary Entry brynpobydd 2005

  • Round her, and for a mile away, they fought like rams and they fought like dogs and they fought like tigers, and over the roaring siren sounds of the fight the gulls flew like the fume of it, screaming and swooping and circling in spirals, and through everything like the continuous thud-thud of a propeller came the dunch of tons of flesh meeting tons of flesh head on, shoulder on, or side on.

    The Beach of Dreams 1907

  • She came round into the wind like a top, and the next moment struck the reef with such a dunch as threw us all flat upon the deck, and came near to shake Mr. Riach from his place upon the mast.

    Kidnapped: The Adventures of David Balfour 1886

  • She came round into the wind like a top, and the next moment struck the reef with such a dunch as threw us all flat upon the deck, and came near to shake Mr. Riach from his place upon the mast.

    Kidnapped Robert Louis Stevenson 1872

  • "B-z-z-z-z!" went William behind the chair; and he added, sotto voce, to Jan, "She be as dunch as a bittle."

    Jan of the Windmill Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing 1863

  • "Ees, I beant dunch," replied the constable, turning and looking at his questioner.

    Tom Brown at Oxford Thomas Hughes 1859

Comments

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  • an intermediary meal between lunch and dinner that replaces both

    October 20, 2007

  • or... to eat dunch (v)

    October 22, 2007

  • Screw you dunch, I hate you. linner forever

    January 10, 2018

  • But, O vain man, dost thou desire to know that linner is better than dunch?

    https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=linner,dunch,lunner,lupper

    January 10, 2018

  • (adjective) - (1) Deaf . . . I have no doubt that dunch is Anglo-Saxon . . . It ought not to be forgotten that many words are . . . being arrested by our etymologists in the present advancing age of investigation.

    --James Jennings' Dialect of Somersetshire, 1869

    (2) Undeaf, to cure of deafness.

    --Robert Hunter's Encyclopædic Dictionary, 1894

    January 16, 2018