/wɛd͡ʒ/
OriginFrom Middle English wegge (“wedge”), from Old English weċġ (“wedge”), from Proto-West Germanic *wagi, from Proto-Germanic *wagjaz.
- countable, uncountableOne of the simple machines; a piece of material, such as metal or wood, thick at one edge and tapered to a thin edge at the other for insertion in a narrow crevice, used for splitting, tightening, securing, or levering.
“Stick a wedge under the door, will you? It keeps blowing shut.”
- countable, uncountableA piece (of food, metal, wood etc.) having this shape.
“Can you cut me a wedge of cheese?”
“We ordered a box of baked potato wedges with our pizza.”
- countable, figuratively, uncountableSomething that creates a division, gap or distance between things.
“It is one of the ironies of capital cities that each acts as a symbol of its nation, and yet few are even remotely representative of it. London has always set itself apart from the rest of Britain — b”
- countable, uncountableA five-sided polyhedron with a rectangular base, two rectangular or trapezoidal sides meeting in an edge, and two triangular ends.
- countable, uncountableA voussoir, one of the wedge-shaped blocks forming an arch or vault.
- archaic, countable, uncountableA flank of cavalry acting to split some portion of an opposing army, charging in an inverted V formation.
- collective, countable, uncountableA group of geese, swans, or other birds when they are in flight in a V formation.
- countable, uncountableA type of iron club used for short, high trajectories.
- countable, uncountableOne of a pair of wedge-heeled shoes.
“She was wearing wedges, and I have a horrible suspicion they were her mum's wedges left over from the last century.”
- countable, obsolete, uncountableAn ingot.
“Open the Males, yet guard the treaſure ſure.
Lay out our golden wedges to the view,
That their reflexions may amaze the Perſeans.”
- broadly, obsolete, slang, uncountableSilver or items made of silver collectively.
- British, broadly, colloquial, countable, uncountableA quantity of money.
“He's got some decent wedge.”
“I made a big fat wedge from that job.”
- US, countable, regional, uncountableA sandwich made on a long, cylindrical roll.
“I ordered a chicken parm wedge from the deli.”
“She hoped it wasn't a meatball wedge, because there's so much garlic in school meatballs that it might make my breath smell and knock the agent out of his chair.”
“Most people realize there are a lot of different names for that type of sandwich, so Scalone wondered what was so funny about wedge?”
- countable, uncountableOne of the basic elements that make up cuneiform writing, a single triangular impression made with the corner of a reed stylus.
- US, countable, uncountableA háček.
“The wedge is used in Czech and is illustrated by the Czech name for the diacritic, haček.”
“The tilde and the circumflex have a place in the ASCII scheme but the wedge and the umlaut do not.”
“The háček or ‘wedge’ ⟨ˇ⟩ is a diacritic commonly used in Slavic orthographies. […] As a tone mark the wedge is used iconically for a falling-rising tone as in Chinese Pinyin.”
- countable, uncountableThe IPA character ʌ, which denotes an open-mid back unrounded vowel.
“Turned V is referred to as “Wedge” by some phoneticians, but this seems inadvisable to us, because the haček accent (ˇ) is also called that in names like Wedge C for (č).”
- countable, uncountableThe symbol ∧, denoting a meet (infimum) operation or logical conjunction.
- countable, uncountableA hairpin, an elongated horizontal V-shaped sign indicating a crescendo or decrescendo.
- countable, uncountableA barometric ridge; an elongated region of high atmospheric pressure between two low-pressure areas.
- countable, uncountableA wedge tornado.
- countable, uncountableA market trend characterized by a contracting range in prices coupled with an upward trend in prices (a rising wedge) or a downward trend in prices (a falling wedge).
- UKThe person whose name stands lowest on the list of the classical tripos.
“The last man is called the Wedge, corresponding to the Spoon in Mathematics.”
- transitiveTo support or secure using a wedge.
“I wedged open the window with a screwdriver.”
“"Did he take his bottle well?" Mrs. Flanders whispered, and Rebecca nodded and went to the cot and turned down the quilt, and Mrs. Flanders bent over and looked anxiously at the baby, asleep, but frow”
- ambitransitiveTo force into a narrow gap.
“He had wedged the package between the wall and the back of the sofa.”
“I wedged into the alcove and listened carefully.”
“During [Tucker] Carlson’s keynote, he wedged sneers at his critics for crying “racist!” in between racist remarks about [Ilhan] Omar, jeremiads against the media (“I know there’s a bunch of reporters ”
- transitiveTo pack (people or animals) together tightly into a mass.
- transitiveTo work wet clay by cutting or kneading for the purpose of homogenizing the mass and expelling air bubbles.
- informal, intransitiveOf a computer program or system: to get stuck in an unresponsive state.
“My Linux kernel wedged after I installed the latest update.”
- transitiveTo cleave with a wedge.
- transitiveTo force or drive with a wedge.
- transitiveTo shape into a wedge.
Formswedges(plural) · wedges(present, singular, third-person) · wedging(participle, present) · wedged(participle, past) · wedged(past) · Wedges(plural)
Source: Wiktionary — CC BY-SA 4.0