1.
[syn: mung, mung bean, green gram, golden gram, Vigna radiata, Phaseolus aureus]
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
Mung \Mung\ (m[u^]ng), n. [Hind. m[=u]ng.] (Bot.)
Green gram, a kind of legume (pulse) (Vigna radiata syn.
Phaseolus aureus, syn. Phaseolus Mungo), grown for food
in British India; called also gram, mung bean, Chinese
mung bean, and green-seeded mung bean. It is an erect,
bushy annual producing edible green or yellow seeds, and
edible pods and young sprouts. --Balfour (Cyc. of India).
[1913 Webster]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
mung
n 1: erect bushy annual widely cultivated in warm regions of
India and Indonesia and United States for forage and
especially its edible seeds; chief source of bean sprouts
used in Chinese cookery; sometimes placed in genus
Phaseolus [syn: mung, mung bean, green gram, golden
gram, Vigna radiata, Phaseolus aureus]
The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003):
mung
/muhng/, vt.
[in 1960 at MIT, ?Mash Until No Good?; sometime after that the derivation
from the recursive acronym ?Mung Until No Good? became standard; but see
munge]
1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and irrevocable changes. See
BLT.
2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The system
only mungs things maliciously; this is a consequence of Finagle's Law.
See scribble, mangle, trash, nuke. Reports from Usenet suggest
that the pronunciation /muhnj/ is now usual in speech, but the spelling
?mung? is still common in program comments (compare the widespread
confusion over the proper spelling of kluge).
3. In the wake of the spam epidemics of the 1990s, mung is now commonly
used to describe the act of modifying an email address in a sig block in a
way that human beings can readily reverse but that will fool an address
harvester. Example: johnNOSPAMsmith@isp.net.
4. The kind of beans the sprouts of which are used in Chinese food. (That's
their real name! Mung beans! Really!)
Like many early hacker terms, this one seems to have originated at TMRC;
it was already in use there in 1958. Peter Samson (compiler of the original
TMRC lexicon) thinks it may originally have been onomatopoeic for the sound
of a relay spring (contact) being twanged. However, it is known that during
the World Wars, ?mung? was U.S.: army slang for the ersatz creamed chipped
beef better known as ?SOS?, and it seems quite likely that the word in fact
goes back to Scots-dialect munge.
Charles Mackay's 1874 book Lost Beauties of the English Language defined ?
mung? as follows: ?Preterite of ming, to ming or mingle; when the
substantive meaning of mingled food of bread, potatoes, etc. thrown to
poultry. In America, ?mung news? is a common expression applied to false
news, but probably having its derivation from mingled (or mung) news, in
which the true and the false are so mixed up together that it is impossible
to distinguish one from another.?
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):
mung
/muhng/ (MIT, 1960) Mash Until No Good.
Sometime after that the derivation from the recursive
acronym "Mung Until No Good" became standard. 1. To make
changes to a file, especially large-scale and irrevocable
changes.
See BLT.
2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously.
The system only mungs things maliciously; this is a
consequence of Finagle's Law.
See scribble, mangle, trash, nuke.
Reports from Usenet suggest that the pronunciation /muhnj/
is now usual in speech, but the spelling "mung" is still
common in program comments (compare the widespread confusion
over the proper spelling of kluge).
3. The kind of beans of which the sprouts are used in Chinese
food. (That's their real name! Mung beans! Really!)
Like many early hacker terms, this one seems to have
originated at TMRC; it was already in use there in 1958.
Peter Samson (compiler of the original TMRC lexicon) thinks it
may originally have been onomatopoeic for the sound of a relay
spring (contact) being twanged. However, it is known that
during the World Wars, "mung" was army slang for the ersatz
creamed chipped beef better known as "SOS".
[Jargon File]
(1994-12-02)