Munge is a lovely sounding word - so lovely that it's accumulated several meanings. Even before the computer age it had a few, fairly rare, usages: to wipe someone's nose; to eat greedily and noisily; and to mutter, grumble or mope.
Now, FOLDOC, the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing, defines it as either "A derogatory term meaning to imperfectly transform information", or "A comprehensive rewrite of a routine, data structure or the whole program". Wiktionary gives it three meanings:
1. (transitive, computing) To transform data in an undefined or unexplained manner.
Few hackers simultaneously munge their programming language and the application written in it.
2. (transitive, computing) To add a spamblock to (an email address).
3. (transitive, genealogy) To erroneously combine information about two different real people into a single record.
It looks like this record is munged—it has this person's birth date, but his father's death date
To add to the confusion, there is a word
mung sometimes used in computing circles, with related meanings: "To make changes to a file, especially large-scale and irrevocable changes" and "To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously" (FOLDOC). So, when we see the inflected forms
munged and
munging, they could be derived from either
mung or
munge. Wikipedia tells us that
mung can stand for "Mash Until No Good", while
munge can mean "Modify Until Not Guessed Easily". (These acronyms were invented after the words were already in use, so they are "backronyms".)
We already allow
mung, possibly for its meaning of a type of bean.
I agree with you, TRex.
Munge and its inflections ought to be allowed. The word is not present in many dictionaries, and seems to be very seldom used outside specialist works, but its use in those texts is frequent enough to warrant it being accepted as a rare word.
