Thunk

1. When referring to ALGOL, a thunk was developed by Peter Ingerman in 1961 and is a function with no parameters that returns an address for the parameter that it was written for.
2. A stubroutine in an overlay programming environment that loads and jumps to the correct overlay.
3. Term sometimes used by users to describe a loud noise. For example the computer hard drive made a loud thunk and stopped working.

Also see: Programming definitions