wedge

Etymology 1

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

noun

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, 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.
3. (figurative) 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. September 28 2013, Kenan Malik, “London Is Special, but Not That Special”, in New York Times, retrieved 2013-09-28
4. (geometry) A five-sided polyhedron with a rectangular base, two rectangular or trapezoidal sides meeting in an edge, and two triangular ends.
5. (architecture) A voussoir, one of the wedge-shaped blocks forming an arch or vault.
6. (archaic) A flank of cavalry acting to split some portion of an opposing army, charging in an inverted V formation.
7. A group of geese, swans, or other birds when they are in flight in a V formation.
8. (golf) A type of iron club used for short, high trajectories.
9. One 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. 2010, Sue Limb, Girls, Guilty But Somehow Glorious
10. (obsolete) An ingot.
11. (obsolete, slang, uncountable) Silver or items made of silver collectively.
12. (colloquial, Britain, countable, uncountable) A quantity of money.
    I made a big fat wedge from that job.
13. (US, regional) 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
    Most people realize there are a lot of different names for that type of sandwich, so Scalone wondered what was so funny about wedge? 2019-10-10, Mark Lungariello, “It's called a wedge in Westchester: Not a hoagie, sub or a grinder”, in The Journal News
14. One of the basic elements that make up cuneiform writing, a single triangular impression made with the corner of a reed stylus.
15. Any symbol shaped like a V in some given orientation.
    1. (typography, 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 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
    2. (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). 1996, Geoffrey Keith Pullum, William A. Ladusaw, Phonetic Symbol Guide, 2nd edition, page 19
    3. (mathematics) The symbol ∧, denoting a meet (infimum) operation or logical conjunction.
    4. (music) A hairpin, an elongated horizontal V-shaped sign indicating a crescendo or decrescendo.
16. (meteorology) A barometric ridge; an elongated region of high atmospheric pressure between two low-pressure areas.
17. (meteorology) A wedge tornado.
18. (finance) 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).

verb

1. (transitive) To support or secure using a wedge.
   I wedged open the window with a screwdriver.
2. (transitive, intransitive) 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.
   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 here, so . . . screw you”), and an attack on Elizabeth Warren and her donors (“She’s a tragedy, because she’s now obsessed with racism, which is why the finance world supports her”)—all to gleeful applause. 2019-7-24, David Austin Walsh, “Flirting With Fascism”, in Jewish Currents
3. (transitive) To pack (people or animals) together tightly into a mass.
4. (transitive) To work wet clay by cutting or kneading for the purpose of homogenizing the mass and expelling air bubbles.
5. (computing, 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.
6. (transitive) To cleave with a wedge.
7. (transitive) To force or drive with a wedge.
8. (transitive) To shape into a wedge.

Etymology 2

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

noun

1. (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