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crunch numbers

audiolaik

Senior Member
Polish
Hello,

David Graham has been and consulting strategically in the television industry for about 15 years.

Does it mean doing a lot of calculations?

Thanks!
It appears in a text about celebrities endorsing goods in advertisements. The phrase crunch numbers is used in the description of an expert on advertising.

Thank you for your help!
I suspect this is a back-formation from the term number-cruncher, often used to refer to very large, powerful computers - especially in the early days. People who used number-crunchers were, of course, using them to crunch numbers.
Typical of such people were mathematicians, physicists, meteorologists, economists, and others involved in complex statistical analyses - including market researchers 👁 Smile :)
Hi!

I'm puzzled with this phrase as well, I hit with this one in the script of a CSI drama,

"I don't crunch numbers. I just spook children."
-- Paul Millander to Gil Grissom (Anonymous)

Maybe the traitor was telling he wasn't so important guy,only he does minor crimes like spook children.

Many Thanks
Typical of such people were mathematicians, physicists, meteorologists, economists, and others involved in complex statistical analyses - including market researchers
And the most common numbers-crunchers of all: accountants. It's still a widely used expression, at least in AE, to refer to anyone whose job involves working primarily with numbers, statistics or data, especially if they are perceived as being isolated from the actual operations of the organization. The term can be slightly derogatory or, if said by the cruncher himself, self-deprecatory. An accountant in a hospital might say:

I just crunch numbers. I don't save lives.
Hi all,
Dredging up an old thread to ask: do you think "crunching" numbers, data, etc. implies anything about the speed? To me, "number-crunching" has always sounded like something slow and laborious. But a dictionary I'm working on defines "crunching" data as "processing it at high speed". Another dictionary I just looked at (Wiktionary) had an example sentence saying "The metadata allows the computer to quickly crunch the data for search queries". The fact that you can "crunch" quickly makes it sound like I'm wrong, but the fact that you need to specify "quickly" makes it sound like plain "crunching" isn't necessarily fast.
What sort of speed, if any, do you understand when someone talks about number-crunching?
Thanks,
-I
Last edited:
The number-cruncher par excellence is the computer, and computers always do it fast, but you can do it without a computer, and then it's slow. Perhaps these days no one does it slowly, because they can feed it into a fast cruncher, but I still don't think of crunching per se as fast.
Okay, sounds like both I and my dictionary are wrong. Thank you both!
-I
<< moderator note. Istarion
But a definition I've just come across defines "crunching" data as "processing it at high speed". Another dictionary I just looked ...
Name your sources (Rule 4) >>
The number-cruncher par excellence is the computer, and computers always do it fast, but you can do it without a computer, and then it's slow. Perhaps these days no one does it slowly, because they can feed it into a fast cruncher, but I still don't think of crunching per se as fast.

The raison d'être for computers was to crunch lots of numbers (doing lots and lots of sums/calculation in a very short time). Computers still crunch though lots of number/data by pure effort. Computers basically crunch numbers, do sums, or move characters arround and store lots of data. And, expletives deleted, fast.

GF..

They were fast even in the early years, round about 1940. These days they are mind-boggling fast, see this Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_computer. The Sequoia is the world's fastest supercomputer at 16.32 petaflops, consuming 7890.0 kW[69].

Petaflop, "A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second"
Quadrillion, 1018,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers.

Crunching, is per se, too mild a word!!!!
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