kludge

noun

ˈklüj

US also and British especially

ˈkləj

variants or kluge

ˈklüj

US also and British especially

ˈkləj

: a haphazard or makeshift solution to a problem and especially to a computer or programming problem

Just getting your documents into and out of the iPad is a kludge. You must e-mail them back and forth to yourself or sync to your computer using iTunes software.—Steve Morgenstern

kludgy adjective

or less commonly kludgey

ˈklü-jē

US also and British especially

ˈklə-

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As long as the origins of kludge (also spelled kluge) are uncertain, any attempt to pin them down will itself be a bit of a kludge—that is, a makeshift solution. The writer Jackson W. Granholm, once thought to have coined the word, offered his own when he wrote in his 1962 article “How to design a kludge” that it came from the German word klug, meaning “smart” or “witty.” This connection is unlikely on both phonetic and semantic grounds, however, and in any event the word already existed. A decade earlier, in an article recounting military folklore acquired from ex-soldiers, Agnes Nolan Underwood related a shaggy-dog story about a sailor named Murgatroyd whose civilian occupation is “kluge maker.” The meaning of kluge is withheld till the end of the tale, when the object made by Murgatroyd turns out to be “the damnedest looking little thing you ever saw—wires and springs sticking out in every direction.” Murgatroyd then accidentally drops the object: “the kluge slipped out and went overboard, down into the ocean, and went ‘kkluuge’.” This suggests a possible onomatopoeic origin for kludge/kluge (we note that the kluge spelling better reflects its pronunciation; the word rhymes with huge, not fudge), but again, nothing in this life is certain but death and taxes, and these days also computer malfunctions.

Examples of kludge in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

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But Perlman thinks that many of these fixes are just clever kludges for an outdated system. —IEEE Spectrum, 18 Mar. 2014 All of the methods Aschenbrenner lumps under that rubric are just kludges that aren’t robust, reliable, or efficient. —Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Fortune, 2 July 2024

Word History

Etymology

of uncertain origin

Note: Although the origin of kludge/kluge is unestablished, two widespread conjectures about the word can probably be dismissed as dubious. It has no plausible relation to German klug /klu:k/ (when followed by a vowel in inflection /klu:g-/) "clever, intelligent." The meaning of the German word is different, and /g/ does not magically turn into /dʒ/. The second notion is that kludge/kluge was coined by Jackson W. Granholm, a columnist for the information science publication Datamation. Though Granholm wrote an article that undoubtedly led to the word's proliferation ("How to design a kludge," Datamation, February, 1962, pp. 30-31), kludge/kluge already existed. It has been claimed that Sperry Rand engineers referred to the Sperry Gyroscope division of the company as "Sperry Gyrokludge" no later than 1959 (see David E. Lundstrom, A Few Good Men from Univac [MIT Press, 1987], p. 45; obituary of Robert B. Forest by Eric Weiss in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 19, no. 2 [1987], p. 71), but this has not been documented by a contemporary print reference. However, kluge with a somewhat different sense is attested a decade earlier in the article "Folklore from GI Joe," by Agnes Nolan Underwood (New York Folklore Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 4 [winter, 1947], pp. 285- ). In recounting military folklore acquired from ex-soldiers in her classes, Underwood relates a shaggy-dog story about a sailor named Murgatroyd whose civilian occupation was "kluge maker." The meaning of kluge is withheld till the end of the tale, when the object made by Murgatroyd turns out to be "the damnedest looking little thing you ever saw—wires and springs sticking out in every direction." Murgatroyd then accidentally drops the object: "the kluge slipped out and went overboard, down into the ocean, and went 'kkluuge'." Two variants of this tale are related in letters to the editor of Infoworld (vol. 5, no. 3 [August 15, 1983], pp. 39-40). The onomatopoeic turn given to the word at the story's conclusion may or may not be its origin. The variant pronunciation with /ʌdʒ/, which may have arisen when the word was transferred from the military sphere to computer jargon, is undoubtedly expressive; compare budge entry 2, drudge entry 1, fudge entry 1, nudge, sludge, smudge entry 1.