Other forms: hunks
A hunk is a thick clumsy piece broken off something. A hunk of bread, a hunk of cheese, tear off a hunk.
It is rougher than a slice and larger than a chunk, and it suggests the piece was pulled rather than cut. The other sense is informal and means an attractive muscular man — he is a bit of a hunk — which is dated and cheerful. Note hunky, meaning the same, and the unrelated phrase hunky-dory, meaning entirely satisfactory, which has no connection with either sense.
1nounhunkA thick clumsy piece broken off something.
“He tore off a hunk of bread and ate it on the way out.”
hunk is a rough piece.
Also accepted in games: chunk
The word probably came from Flemish hunke, meaning a lump. It appeared in English in the eighteenth century, and the admiring sense for a man is twentieth-century American.
vls
hunke — hunk; chunk
English, today
hunk
Built from
Probably borrowed from vls hunke (“hunk; chunk”), of obscure origin. Probably from an earlier humke, humpke, a diminutive related to Dutch homp (“hunk; lump”), English hump, equivalent to hump + kin. The sense of an attractive man is recorded in Australian slang in 1941, in jive talk in 1945.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA