Steve Morgenstern
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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
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
There was even some hope, in the 1990s, that this informal but successful kludge could be formalized, with a more explicit gold link.
—Nathan Lewis, Forbes, 5 May 2023
The kludge is so technically difficult for digital technology to incorporate that other, ersatz methods of timekeeping — unofficial, but free of leap seconds and easier to implement — have begun to displace U.T.C., according to a recent article in the journal Metrologia.
—Alanna Mitchell, New York Times, 14 Nov. 2022
The hybrid schedule exists solely as a kludge and back-formation from the standard six-foot guideline for social distancing.
—David Zweig, Wired, 6 Aug. 2020
And while there surely is a lot of regulatory kludge (or maybe sludge?) that has developed through the years that could be removed without harm, there’s not much evidence of a systematic effort to do that.
—Washington Post, 28 Feb. 2019
Its eight episodes comprise a centerless, ham-handed kludge of a season, one that keeps beating you over the head with music and ACTING and plot twists to try to convince you everything that’s happening is Important.
—Todd Vanderwerff, Vox, 2 Nov. 2018
And there are various other fourth-best kludges, ways of wedging a de facto price on carbon into markets.
—David Roberts, Vox, 27 Apr. 2018
Cite this Entry
“Kludge.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kludge. Accessed 15 Mar. 2025.
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