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Crash
  • n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system (q. v. , sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what happened when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). "Three lusers lost their files in last night's disk crash. " A disk crash that involves the read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a `head crash', whereas the term `system crash' usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at fault.
  • v. To fail suddenly. "Has the system just crashed?" "Something crashed the OS!" See down. Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both). "Those idiots playing SPACEWAR crashed the system. "
  • vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a long hacking run; see gronk out.