Thunk may refer to any of the following:

  1. In computer programming, thunk was a helper subroutine designed by Peter Ingerman in 1961 for the ALGOL programming language. It was called “thunk” as a playful past tense of “think,” because it calculated a subroutine’s result before passing the value. Thunks enabled a programmer to pass parameters by name rather than value, and were an important step in the design of programming languages and compilers.

  2. A thunk is a stubroutine in an overlay programming environment that loads and jumps to the correct overlay.

  3. Term sometimes used by users to describe a loud noise. For example, the computer hard drive made a loud thunk and stopped working.

Programming terms

  • What is causing noise in my computer?