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Etymology 1[edit]

Middle English wegge ‎(wedge), Old English wecg ‎(wedge), from Proto-Germanic *wagjaz.


wedge ‎(plural wedges)


A wedge
  1. One 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.
  2. A piece (of food, etc.) having this shape.
    Can you cut me a wedge of cheese?
  3. (geometry) A five-sided polyhedron with a rectangular base, two rectangular or trapezoidal sides meeting in an edge, and two triangular ends.
  4. (figuratively) Something 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 — but political, economic and social trends are conspiring to drive that wedge deeper.
  5. (archaic) A flank of cavalry acting to split some portion of an opposing army, charging in an inverted V formation.
  6. (golf) A type of iron club used for short, high trajectories.
  7. A group of geese, swans or other birds when they are in flight in a V formation.
  8. (in the plural) Wedge-heeled shoes.
  9. (colloquial, Britain) A quantity of money.
    I made a big fat wedge from that job.
  10. (typography, US) háček
    • 1982, Thomas Pyles and John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language (3rd ed.), page 49
      The wedge is used in Czech and is illustrated by the Czech name for the diacritic, haček.
    • 1996, Geoffrey Keith Pullum and William A. Ladusaw, Phonetic Symbol Guide (2nd ed.), page xxvi
      The tilde and the circumflex have a place in the ASCII scheme but the wedge and the umlaut do not.
    • 1999, Florian Coulmas, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, page 193, “háček”
      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.
  11. (phonetics) The 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).
  12. (mathematics) The symbol , denoting a meet (infimum) operation or logical conjunction.
Derived terms[edit]
  • (group of geese): skein
  • (phonetics: IPA character <ʌ>): turned v


wedge ‎(third-person singular simple present wedges, present participle wedging, simple past and past participle wedged)

  1. To support or secure using a wedge.
    I wedged open the window with a screwdriver.
    • 1922, Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room Chapter 1
  2. To force into a narrow gap.
    He had wedged the package between the wall and the back of the sofa.
  3. To work wet clay by cutting or kneading for the purpose of homogenizing the mass and expelling air bubbles.

Derived terms[edit]

Etymology 2[edit]

From Wedgewood, surname of the person who occupied this position on the first list of 1828.


wedge ‎(plural wedges)

  1. (Britain, Cambridge University, slang) The person whose name stands lowest on the list of the classical tripos.
    • 1873, Charles Astor Bristed, Five Years in an English University
      The last man is called the Wedge, corresponding to the Spoon in Mathematics.
See also[edit]