Daylight, between mouthfuls, fed chunks of ice into the tin pot, where it thawed into water. ... Daylight cut up generous chunks of bacon and dropped them in the pot of bubbling beans.
A representative portion of a substance, often large and irregular.
1994, Gene Perret, Successful Stand-up Comedy: Advice from a Comedy Writer, page 80:
You begin gathering two hours of dependable comedy by developing that first three-minute chunk. When you're satisfied with it, you create another three minutes of laughs, then another three minutes.
2012, Jay Sankey, Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy, page 168:
If you're gigging outdoors for the Society of Catholic Gardeners, don't close your set with your "Papa Beelzebub" chunk (no matter how life affirming you think it is!).
(transitive) To break down (language, etc.) into conceptual pieces of manageable size.
2005, Yong Zhao, Research in Technology and Second Language Education:
These results offer tentative evidence that suggests that certain components of computer-mediated instruction (in this case, access to and control over syntactically chunked, captioned video) are not necessarily beneficial for certain learners […]