stonking [L20th] In military slang in the Second World War a stonk was a heavy artillery bombardment, and to stonk was to bombard with concentrated artillery fire. This appears to be a transferred use of an early 19th century term for a game of marbles or the marbles themselves, perhaps from the way a marbles player attempts to hit and knock out his opponents. The transferred use had already appeared in Australian and New Zealand slang in the First World War in the form stonker ‘to put out of action, kill, destroy, outwit’, later developing into an adjective stonkered ‘drunk, extremely tired’. However, it seems to have taken until the 1980s for stonk to develop into both stonker ‘something very large or impressive’ and stonking, both as an adjective ‘excellent, amazing, powerful’ and a bit later as an adverb ‘extremely’. The origin of these words is not known but may go back to the sound of marbles hitting one another.