bunch: [14] Bunch originally meant ‘swelling’ (the first text recorded as containing the word, the Middle English poem Body and Soul 1325, speaks of ragged folk ‘with broad bunches on their back’), but we have no real clues as to its source. Perhaps, like bump, it was ultimately imitative of the sound of hitting something, the sense ‘swelling’ being the result of the blows. The first hints of the modern sense ‘cluster, collection’ come in the mid-15th century in the phrase bunch of straw, although how this derived from ‘swelling’ is not clear.
