the.com/chunk
The amount of a thing you can handle without crying; varies wildly by thing and day.
means A solid, substantial piece of something, broken or cut off from a larger whole.
from Appeared in English in the 17th century, likely a variant of 'chuck,' an old word meaning a lump or block of wood. The exact lineage is murky — it may also be tangled up with 'chink' or simply be an echoic coinage, one of those thick, blunt-sounding words invented to match the blunt, thick thing it names.
- cognitive origin
- coined for memory research, grouping bits into one unit
- chess term
- losing a piece for nothing, informally called chunking
- vague by design
- bigger than a bit, smaller than a whole, nobody argues specifics