WORD OF THE DAY: KLUDGE
noun | KLOOJ
A kludge is a haphazard or makeshift solution to a problem and especially to a computer or programming problem.
// Andy knocked out a hasty kludge to circumvent the glitch until a more robust solution could be developed.
EXAMPLE OF KLUDGE
“The advent of television in the 1940s allowed the movie industry to reconsider frame rates. Unfortunately, primitive video technology limited dramatic improvements. … While the frame rate exceeded cinema, the resolution (how much information each frame actually contained) paled in comparison to 35-mm film. Even worse, the kludge enabling colour broadcasting further degraded video quality.” — Rich Warren, The News-Gazette (Champaign, Illinois), 13 Apr. 2025.
DID YOU KNOW?
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
Merriam Webster Dictionary
