Also spelled "mung," the slangy word "munge" dates back to 1883 in the US. We've used it to mean, among other things, "to spoil something, to mangle it, or to otherwise mess it up" as well as "a gross, mangled mess." 

And, possibly as early as 1958, people at MIT and beyond started using the word in computing slang. To mung (or munge) a file or a collection of data is to really mess it up: to destroy it, to corrupt it, or to make changes to it so that it's not useful. (Sources conflict on how this slangy usage arose: possibly as a specific use of the older word, or possibly from the acronym "Mash Until No Good—" or that may just be a fun backronym.) 

More recently, the term "data munging" has evolved to refer to the process of taking messy data and cleaning it, organizing it, or somehow enriching so that it can be used again. (Why didn't they call it "de-munging" or "un-munging"? Probably for convenience. The same reason we don't talk about "de-fleecing" a sheep or "un-hamstringing" a football player.)

Here's one more meaning! To munge a password is to make that password more secure by adding unique characters to it. As Wikipedia explains, this version of "munge" is sometimes whimsically "backronymmed as Modify Until Not Guessed Easily."

Part of speech:

It can be a verb: "They just munged it all together and called it a day."

And a noun: "In George's Marvelous Medicine, George goes around adding paint and hair gel and horse pills and so on to his enormous cooking pot and then heats it all up into a revolting brown munge."

Other forms: 

Munged, munging.

how to use it:

When you need a weird, slangy, sloppy-sounding synonym of "mix," how about "munge"?

Outside of its use in computer slang, something about "munge" makes people cringe, so if that's what you're going for, you might talk about munging things together, munging things up, or combining things into a munge.

examples:

"Email-harvesting bots roam the web, looking for email addresses of real people (probably so the bot owners can send lots of spam emails). Changing one's email in a human-readable way is quite common in academic websites. The fancy word for this is address munging."
— Jack J. Garzella, Personal blog hosted by UC San Diego, 16 August 2021

"[The Hyundai Ioniq 6] reminded me of those books you got as a kid with pictures of like a farmer, a Policeman etc. etc. and the pages were split into thirds so you could have a farmer's head, policeman's middle and a ballerina's legs. It's the car version with various bits all munged together."
— J4CKO, Pistonheads.com, 8 December 2022

has this page helped you understand "munge"?

Awesome, I'm glad it helped!

Thanks for letting me know!
If you have any questions about this word, please message me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.

study it:

Explain the meaning of "munge" without saying "gunk" or "to gunk up."

try it out:

If you want to talk about creating things in a messy way, you might say that you're munging things together (rather than blending them, combining them, or mingling them). 

Fill in the blanks: "To make (something, like a recipe, a meal, a song, a poem, a story, a plan, or an excuse), I munged (some different things) together."

Example 1: "We were feeling lazy, so for dinner we just munged together a bunch of stuff from the freezer."

Example 2: "I was jonesing for some of the tuna poke I'd had while in Hawaii, so I searched around for a couple of recipes and munged them together with ingredients at hand. The result was glorious."
— Forkmonkey, Reddit.com, 2012

If you like, use this space to write. (To save your work, copy and paste it into an email or a document.)

before you review, play:

Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.

Our game for March is "Tidbits and Titles: Books That Became Movies!"

I provide the tidbits; you provide the title. And every answer will be a book that has been made into a movie. To see the answer, scroll all the way down. Let's play!

Here's a quote from the book: "Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."

Here are some words and phrases that often appear in that book: Cellblock, chance, damn, dark, dollars, drink, exercise yard, fellow, guards, happy, hard, hell, hope, inside, lawyer, Maine, months, never, night, Norton, Rita, rock-hammer, wall.

What's the book's title?

review this word:

1. In its most general sense, the opposite of a MUNGE could be

A. a TIDY BLEND.
B. a GENEROUS PERSON.
C. a LAND OF OPPORTUNITY.

2. Mary Branscombe explains in Tech Republic: "Often known as the universal data munging tool, Excel is trying out new options for _____."

A. processing messy text
B. users working on small screens
C. quickly importing sets of data

Answers to the review questions: 1. A 2. A Answer to the game question: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. If you came up with the movie title, that's great, too: The Shawshank Redemption.

a final word:

I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love. I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words. From my blog: On vocabulary...       36 ways to study words.       Why we forget words, & how to remember them.       How to use sophisticated words without being awkward. On writing...       How to improve any sentence.       How to motivate our kids to write.       How to stop procrastinating and start writing.       How to bulk up your writing when you have to meet a word count. From my heart: a profound thanks to the generous patrons, donors, and sponsors that make it possible for me to write these emails. If you'd like to be a patron or a donor, please click here. If you'd like to be a sponsor and include your ad in an issue, please contact me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com. A disclaimer: When I write definitions, I use plain language and stick to the words' common, useful applications. If you're interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words, I encourage you to check a dictionary. Also, because I'm American, I stick to American English when I share words' meanings, usage, and pronunciations; these elements sometimes vary across world Englishes.