as in crises
a time or state of affairs requiring prompt or decisive action
with only three minutes left in the game, it was definitely crunch time
Synonyms & Similar Words
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Example Sentences
Recent Examples of Synonyms for crunch times
Noun
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That move set in motion two decades of big inflations, serial currency and banking crises, and debt defaults.—
Shawn Tully,
Fortune,
8 Oct. 2025 -
Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman was a leader of the Janjaweed militia, which killed hundreds of thousands of members of Darfur’s non-Arab population in the early 2000s, sparking one of the world’s gravest and most enduring humanitarian crises.—
Jeronimo Gonzalez,
semafor.com,
7 Oct. 2025
Noun
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Our institutions – businesses, universities, and society – stand at this crossroads.—
Jim Edwards,
Fortune,
1 Oct. 2025
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That geography has long placed the Central Asian nation at a crossroads, straddling both Europe and Asia.—
Nina Subkhanberdina,
CNN Money,
30 Sep. 2025
Noun
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Thermodynamics drives selective recovery The researchers hypothesized that FJH combined with chlorine gas could exploit differences in Gibbs free energy and boiling points to selectively remove non-REE elements from magnet waste.—
Neetika Walter,
Interesting Engineering,
29 Sep. 2025
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Curio’s process is a dry electrochemical and pyroprocessing system, using heat and chemical reactions to separate isotopes and fission products, thanks to the materials’ different boiling points and weights.—
John Koetsier,
Forbes.com,
28 Aug. 2025
Noun
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Those efforts are now critical as AI and semiconductors become geopolitical flash points.—
Nick Lichtenberg,
Fortune,
5 Aug. 2025
Noun
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By December, Seattle taxpayers were paying a hefty $4,200 a month per empty room — at a time when thousands of Seattleites were without a roof over their heads.—
Ashley Hiruko,
ProPublica,
6 Oct. 2025
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The rounded piston heads, slotted into a rounded chamber to match, offered higher efficiency with less energy lost to heat while fuel is combusted before being sent out as exhaust.—
Liam Rappleye,
USA Today,
6 Oct. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Crunch times.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/crunch%20times. Accessed 8 Oct. 2025.
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