zorch

zorch (third-person singular simple present zorches, present participle zorching, simple past and past participle zorched)

1. (intransitive, transitive, slang) To destroy or ruin, especially by electronic means.
   • 1990 November 30, Jim Burnes, “"ZOG"?”, in alt.conspiracy‎ (Usenet):

     I was well on my way to zorching my GPA as a sophomore and becoming quite the computer hacker when Luis my mentor took me aside. He told me that my grades werent up to snuff when I told him I was getting C's in Spanish (that was my best subject that month).

   • 2002 April 3, John Schilling, “Interstellar Flight Today”, in rec.arts.sf.science‎ (Usenet):

     Assuming you are willing to live with the consequences, which include obliterating everything within a hundred kilometers of your launch site, dumping a hundred tons of fallout into the stratosphere, and zorching every piece of electronics sight.

   • 2002 May 20, Timothy A. McDaniel, “ConJose planning”, in rec.arts.sf.fandom‎ (Usenet):

     […] I probably just wasn't inserting the memory DIMM correctly, not that it was intrinsically unseatable; I zorched the motherboard myself when trying to remove disk drives […]

   • 2003 May 7, Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr, “AKICIF: Browser bafflement”, in rec.arts.sf.fandom‎ (Usenet):

     But if you're doing disk-to-disk backup you want at least two backup disks, since it's kind of a nightmare if your good disk zorches right in the middle of the backup, giving you a zorched backup disk as well.

   • 2011 July 15, Curt, “First Rule of Liberalism”, in seattle.politics‎ (Usenet):

     Zorching the economy so badly we still haven't dug out two years after he's gone ..

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

zorch (uncountable)

1. A numerical factor used to limit semantic searches in cognitive modelling.
   • 1987, John McDermott, Artificial Intelligence: 10th International Joint Conference, volume 1, page 152:

     This is done by using a numerical constant, called zorch, to start marker-passing and dividing it by outbranching […]

   • 1989, Noel E. Sharkey, Models of Cognition: A Review of Cognitive Science:

     […] it and all its first set of descendants can be marked, but the zorch runs out quickly.

   • 2008, Richard Trent Llewellyn, Annotating the Biological Process of Proteins with Functional Linkages, page 39:

     In order to quantify network connectivity between one protein and others, we adapted the idea of zorch originally used to describe cognition (Hendler, 1989).

• Guy L Steele Jr., Donald R. Woods, Raphael A. Finkel, Mark R Crispin, Richard M Stallman, Geoffrey S. Goodfellow (1983) “ZORCH”, in The Hacker's Dictionary: A Guide to the Computer Underground, New York: Harper & Row, →ISBN, page 126