Entry · catalog no. 6053

crunk

/ /krʌŋk/ /KRUHNK

adjective · U.S. South (Atlanta, Georgia and Memphis, Tennessee) · 1980s

✓ Verified

Wound up, hyped, and energized past the point of restraint — the state of being loud, excited, and ready to turn a room out, whether from music, adrenaline, alcohol, weed, or all three at once. It can describe a person, a party, a club, a song, or a car stereo pushed to full volume. In its verb form, 'to get crunk' means to work oneself and everyone around into that state; as a noun it names the Southern hip-hop genre — heavy on shouted chants, sparse drum-machine beats, and call-and-response hooks — built to produce that feeling.

“The DJ dropped the bassline and the whole club got crunk in about ten seconds flat.”

Origin & Attribution

Rooted in Black club and party culture of the U.S. South, first as everyday slang in Atlanta and Memphis before it named a genre. Multiple in-community accounts describe it as a dialectal past-tense/past-participle form of "crank" — as in "cranked up" — rather than a coinage of any outside group.

1980s

Everyday club slang in Atlanta describing being full of energy or hyped up

1993

OutKast uses the word in "Player's Ball," its first documented appearance in mainstream recorded music

1997

Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz release Get Crunk, Who U Wit: Da Album, helping cement crunk as a genre name

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

The South

U.S. South (Atlanta, Georgia and Memphis, Tennessee) · 1980s

Spoken by

Black Southern club-goers, hip-hop artists and fans, later adopted nationwide through crunk music's mainstream crossover

$CRUNKThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Peaked

33 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

58/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1993

in the culture

Recorded here

2026

point of first record

Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.

Hear it spoken

By region — how it actually sounds

@nolakid

New Orleans, LA

@htxdri

Houston, TX

Contribute your pronunciation

Citations & Sources

■

1993, OutKast, "Player's Ball"

song/verse

■

1997, Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, Get Crunk, Who U Wit: Da Album

album title

■

1995, Totally Unofficial Rap-Dictionary (Usenet posting)

early lexicographic citation, per OED

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