crash

1. 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 happens when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). A disk 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, whereas the
term system  usually, though not always, implies that the operating system
or other software was at fault. 2. 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. 3. vi. Sometimes said
of people hitting the sack after a long hacking run; see gronk out.
