wedge

UK/wɛd͡ʒ/

wedge noun: 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.

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

wedge (countable and uncountable, plural wedges)

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.
1. A 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, and an iceberg wedge as our side salad.
2. A five-sided polyhedron with a rectangular base, two rectangular or trapezoidal sides meeting in an edge, and two triangular ends.
3. A voussoir, one of the wedge-shaped blocks forming an arch or vault.
(figuratively) Something that creates a division, gap or distance between things.
- Near-synonyms: wedge issue, salami tactics, culture wars
- drive a wedge between [persons, peoples, camps, allies, etc.]
Synonyms:

wedge issue, salami tactics, culture war
1. (figuratively) A type of iron club used for short, high trajectories; a shot made with such a club.
2. (figuratively) One of a pair of wedge-heeled shoes, which lift the heel of the foot from the ground.
  - She was wearing wedges, and I have a horrible suspicion they were her mum's wedges left over from the last century.2010, Sue Limb, Girls, Guilty But Somehow Glorious
(US) A háček.
- The wedge is used in Czech and is illustrated by the Czech name for the diacritic, haček.1982, Thomas Pyles, John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language, 3rd edition, page 49
- The tilde and the circumflex have a place in the ASCII scheme but the wedge and the umlaut do not.1996, Geoffrey Keith Pullum, William A. Ladusaw, Phonetic Symbol Guide, 2nd edition, page xxvi
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).1996, Geoffrey Keith Pullum, William A. Ladusaw, Phonetic Symbol Guide, 2nd edition, page 19
The symbol ∧, denoting a meet (infimum) operation or logical conjunction.
A hairpin, an elongated horizontal V-shaped sign indicating a crescendo or decrescendo.
One of the basic elements that make up cuneiform writing, a single triangular impression made with the corner of a reed stylus.
(obsolete) An ingot.
- Open the Males, yet guard the treaſure ſure.
  Lay out our golden wedges to the view,
  That their reflexions may amaze the Perſeans.c. 1587–1588 (date written), [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC...
1. (broadly, obsolete, slang, uncountable) Silver or items made of silver collectively.
2. (UK, broadly, colloquial, obsolete) A quantity of money.
  - He's got some decent wedge.
  - I made a big fat wedge from that job.
(archaic) A flank of cavalry acting to split some portion of an opposing army, charging in an inverted V formation.
(collective) A group of cranes, ducks, geese, gulls, pelicans, swans or other birds when they are in flight in a V formation.
- The girl stopped short off and searched the sky for a wedge of geese.1924, George Marsh, The Valley of Voices, Hodder and Stoughton, page 351
- A screaming wedge of birds wheeled above me, then winged off across the darkening water1991, William F. Nolan, “Dark Bedfellows: The Horrors in My Life”, in Weird Tales 302, number Fall 1991, page 14
Synonyms:

chevron, skein
A wedge tornado.
A barometric ridge; an elongated region of high atmospheric pressure between two low-pressure areas.
A 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).
(New-York, US, regional, especially Westchester) A 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.1983, Marlene Fanta Shyer, Adorable Sunday, Scholastic
Synonyms:

hero sandwich, more at submarine sandwich

Verb

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

(transitive) To 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 frowning. The window shook, and Rebecca stole like a cat and wedged it.1922 October 26, Virginia Woolf, chapter 1, in Jacob’s Room, Richmond, London: […] Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, →OCLC; republished London: The Hogarth Press, 1960, →OCLC
Synonyms:

scotch
(ambitransitive) To 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.
(transitive) To pack (people or animals) together tightly into a mass.
(transitive) To work wet clay by cutting or kneading for the purpose of homogenizing the mass and expelling air bubbles.
(informal, intransitive) Of a computer program or system: to get stuck in an unresponsive state.
- My Linux kernel wedged after I installed the latest update.
(transitive) To cleave with a wedge.
(transitive) To force or drive with a wedge.
(transitive) To shape into a wedge.

Noun (2)

wedge (plural wedges)

(UK, Cambridge University slang) The 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.1873, Charles Astor Bristed, Five Years in an English University
Synonyms:

wooden wedge

Proper noun capitalized: Wedge

Wedge (plural Wedges)

A surname.

wedge meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Bengali

wedge in Hindi

simple machine: कील kīl, वैज vaij

wedge in Tamil

வெட்ஜ்

wedge in Urdu

simple machine: کِیل kīl

wedge in Bengali

simple machine: কীল kil

More languagesFewer languages

wedge in Telugu: చప్ప cappa, మొల mola
wedge in Malayalam: ആപ്പ് āppŭ
wedge in Kannada: ಬೆಣೆ, ಬೇರ್ಪಡಿಸು, ಬೆಣೆಹೊಡೆ, ಕಿಕ್ಕಿರಿ
wedge in Punjabi: ਫਾਨਾ phānā
wedge in Gujarati: ફાચર phācar
wedge in Assamese: শাল xal
wedge in Arabic: إِسْفِين ʔisfīn, وَتِد watid, وَتَد watad
wedge in Malay: baji
wedge in Thai: ลิ่ม lîm
wedge in Vietnamese: nêm, chêm
wedge in Myanmar: သပ် sap

Examples of wedge in a sentence

London has always set itself apart from the rest of Britain — but political, economic and social trends are conspiring to drive that wedge deeper.2013 September 28, Kenan Malik, “London Is Special, but Not That Special”, in New York Times, retrieved 28 Sep 2013:
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.1999, Florian Coulmas, “háček”, in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, page 193:
Most people realize there are a lot of different names for that type of sandwich, so Scalone wondered what was so funny about wedge?2019 October 10, Mark Lungariello, “It's called a wedge in Westchester: Not a hoagie, sub or a grinder”, in The Journal News:

All 40 example sentences with wedge

Synonyms of wedge

All synonyms of wedge

Forms of wedge

Noun
plural	wedges
Verb
third-person singular present	wedges
present participle	wedging
past participle	wedged
past	wedged
Proper noun
plural	Wedges

Past tense of wedge: wedged

Plural of wedge: wedges

Origin of wedge

From Middle English wegge (“wedge”), from Old English weċġ (“wedge”), from Proto-West Germanic *wagi, from Proto-Germanic *wagjaz.

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

Phrases with wedge

13 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with wedge

9 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about wedge

What does wedge mean?: Wedge means 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.
What is wedge in Hindi?: Wedge in Hindi is कील (kīl), वैज (vaij). See Wedge meaning in Hindi.
How do you use wedge in a sentence?: London has always set itself apart from the rest of Britain — but political, economic and social trends are conspiring to drive that wedge deeper.
What part of speech is wedge?: Wedge can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce wedge?: Wedge is pronounced /wɛd͡ʒ/ (UK).
What is the plural of wedge?: The plural of wedge is wedges.

Words near wedge in the dictionary

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-wedge.ogg.

Cite this entry: “wedge.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wedge. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.