Kludge
[kloodj]
Part of speech: verb
Origin: Invented word, 1960s
1.
Use ill-assorted parts to make (something).
Examples of Kludge in a sentence
"The campers kludged a rickety lever and pulley system to carry buckets of water up from the river."
"The computer that ran the house lights was on the fritz, but Svend managed to kludge a repair, despite his minimal tech skills."
About Kludge
The root of “kludge” is unclear, but the word may be related to the German word “klug,” meaning “clever,” or the Danish term “kludder,” meaning “disorder.”
Did you Know?
The word “kludge” was popularized in the 1962 article “How to Design a Kludge,” published in the computing magazine “Datamation,” but that was not the birth of the term. The Oxford English Dictionary considers “kludge” an invented word based on the existing words “bodge” and “fudge,” but there are some potential etymological ties to German and Danish terms. “Kludge” is related to — but distinct from — the U.S. military slang word “kluge,” meaning “something that shouldn’t work but does.” Because “kludge” was associated with computing quite early on, that has become the most commonly used context for the term. Though “kludge” began life as a noun describing a solution cobbled together out of unlikely parts, today it is also used as a verb to describe the process of implementing a crude but functional solution.
