A short, thick piece of wood.--Webster. Ihis word is provincial in the South of England.--Ray. Grose.
It is sometimes called a junk in this country, as well as in England. The English dictionaries have the word chump, which is used in the same sense as chunk. This word is also applied to other things besides wood. I have often heard the butchers in market say, 'chunk of beef.'
A name given by the white traders to the oblong four-square yards adjoining the high mounts and rotundas of the modern Indians of Florida. In the centre of these stands the obelisk, and at each corner of the farther end stands a slave post, or strong stake, where the captives that are burnt alive are bound.--Bartram.
The pyramidal hills or artificial mounts, and highways or avenues, leading from them to artificial lakes or ponds, vast tetragon terraces, chunk-yards, and obelisks or pillars of wood, are the only monuments of labor, ingenuity, and magnificence, that I have seen worthy of notice.--Bartram, Travels in Florida (1773), p.518.
This is doubtless an Indian term, and the enclosure a place where the natives played a game called chunkee, as will appear by the following extract from Du Pratz:
"The warriors practise a diversion which they call the game of the pole, at which only two play at a time. Each pole is about eight feet long, resembling a Roman f, and the game consists in rolling a flat round stone, about three inches in diameter and one inch thick, and throwing the pole in such a manner, that when the stone rests the pole may be at or near it. Both the antagonists throw their poles at the same time, and he whose pole is nearest the stone counts one, and has the right of rolling the stone."--Hist. of Louisiana, 1720.
Adair speaks of the same game, which is by the Indians called chungke.--History American Indians, p. 402. Catlin notices the same among the Mandans and Creeks, called by them Tchungkee.--Catlin's Indians, Vol. I. p. 132.