Etymology

Verb

1. To eat or consume greedily.

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

   • 1999: Marya Hornbacker, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, page 239

     Freed from the usual inhibitions, we get home and I snarf down pasta salad right out of the Tupperware container...

   • 2000: Nancy Woodruff, Someone Else's Child, page 40

     "I'm not going to sit there while you two watch me snarf a whole pie by myself."

   • 2003: Allen D. Berrien, Powerboat Care and Repair: How to Keep Your Outboard, Sterndrive, Or Gas-Inboard Boat Alive and Well, page 41

     The old 40-horse models used to snarf up more fuel than today's 90-horse models.

2. To take something by dubious means, but without the connotations of stealing; to take something without regard to etiquette.

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

   • 1995: Tom Shanley, Don Anderson, ISA System Architecture, page 296

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

   • 1996: Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, page 399

     ...in addition, the embedding enables the designer to snarf features from the underlying language ...

   • 2001: Brad A. Myers, Choon Hong Peck, Jeffrey Nicols, Dave Kong, and Robert Miller, Interacting at a Distance Using Semantic Snarfing, in Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pages 305-314.

     Other future applications of the semantic snarfing idea might include classrooms, where students might snarf interesting pieces of content from the instructor's presentation; ...

3. To expel fluid or food through the mouth or nostrils accidentally, usually while attempting to stifle laughter with one's mouth full.

   • It was so funny, I snarfed my milk onto my keyboard.

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

   • I snarfed the whole database into my program.