1. [n]  (football) kicking in which the football is dropped from the hands and kicked before it touches the ground; "the punt traveled 50 yards"; "punting is an important part of the game"
2. [n]  an open flat-bottomed boat used in shallow waters and propelled by a long pole
3. [n]  the basic unit of money in Ireland; equal to 100 pence
4. [v]  place a bet on; "Which horse are you backing?"; "I'm betting on the new horse"
5. [v]  propel with a pole; of barges on rivers, for example
6. [v]  kick the ball; in certain kinds of sports

1. \Punt\, v. i.
   1. To boat or hunt in a punt.
   2. To punt a football.
   

2. \Punt\, v. i. [F. ponter, or It. puntare, fr. L. punctum
   point. See {Point}.]
   To play at basset, baccara, faro. or omber; to gamble.
         She heard . . . of his punting at gaming tables.
                                                  --Thackeray.
   

3. \Punt\, n.
   Act of playing at basset, baccara, faro, etc.
   

4. \Punt\, n. [AS., fr. L. ponto punt, pontoon. See
   {Pontoon}.] (Naut.)
   A flat-bottomed boat with square ends. It is adapted for use
   in shallow waters.
   

5. \Punt\, v. t.
   1. To propel, as a boat in shallow water, by pushing with a
      pole against the bottom; to push or propel (anything) with
      exertion. --Livingstone.
   2. (Football) To kick (the ball) before it touches the
      ground, when let fall from the hands.
   

6. \Punt\, n. (Football)
   The act of punting the ball.
   

(From the punch line of an old joke referring to American football: "Drop back 15 yards and punt!") 1. To give up, typically without any intention of retrying. "Let's punt the movie tonight." "I was going to hack all night to get this feature in, but I decided to punt" may mean that you've decided not to stay up all night, and may also mean you're not ever even going to put in the feature.

2. More specifically, to give up on figuring out what the Right Thing is and resort to an inefficient hack.

3. A design decision to defer solving a problem, typically because one cannot define what is desirable sufficiently well to frame an algorithmic solution. "No way to know what the right form to dump the graph in is - we'll punt that for now."

4. To hand a tricky implementation problem off to some other section of the design. "It's too hard to get the compiler to do that; let's punt to the run-time system."

[Jargon File]