Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun 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.
- noun Something shaped like a wedge.
- noun A wedge-shaped formation, as in ground warfare.
- noun Something that intrudes and causes division or disruption.
- noun Something that forces an opening or a beginning.
- noun Sports An iron golf club with a very slanted face, used to lift the ball sharply upward, as from sand.
- noun A shoe having a heel that extends across the shank to the half sole, forming a continuous undersurface.
- noun One of the various triangular marks that are the basic structural elements of cuneiform writing symbols.
- noun Sports In snow skiing, the snowplow.
- transitive verb To split or force apart with or as if with a wedge.
- transitive verb To fix in place or tighten with a wedge.
- transitive verb To crowd or squeeze into a limited space.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A simple machine consisting of a very acute-angled triaugular prism of hard material, which is driven in between objects to be separated, or into anything which is to be split.
- noun A mass resembling a wedge in form; anything in the form of a wedge.
- noun In heraldry, a bearing representing a triangle with one very acute angle—that is, like a pile, but free in the escutcheon instead of being attached to one of its edges.
- noun In Cambridge University, the name given to the man whose name stands lowest on the list of the classical tripos: said to be a designation suggested by the name (Wedgewood) of the man who occupied this place on the first list (1824). Compare
wooden spoon , under spoon. - To cleave with a wedge or with wedges; rive.
- To drive as a wedge is driven; crowd or compress closely; jam.
- To fasten with a wedge or with wedges; fix in the manner of a wedge: as, to
wedge on a scythe; to wedge in a rail or a piece of timber. - In ceramics, to cut, divide, and work together (a mass of wet clay) to drive out bubbles and render it plastic, just before placing it on the wheel.
- To make into the shape of a wedge; render cuneiform.
- To force apart or split off with or as with a wedge.
- To force one's way like a wedge.
- In forestry, to force by wedges (a tree that is being felled) to topple over.
- noun A pledge; a gage.
- noun In geometry, a prismatoid whose lower base is a rectangle, and upper base a line (sect) parallel to a basal edge.
- noun In ancient oriental archæol., an arrow-headed character, the shape of which was produced by pressing one corner of a solid square wand or the like into soft clay.
- noun A playing-card so trimmed that one end is narrower than the other, so that when a certain part of the pack is turned round it can be withdrawn again at will, no matter how much the pack may be shuffled in the meantime.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb To cleave or separate with a wedge or wedges, or as with a wedge; to rive.
- transitive verb To force or drive as a wedge is driven.
- transitive verb To force by crowding and pushing as a wedge does.
- transitive verb To press closely; to fix, or make fast, in the manner of a wedge that is driven into something.
- transitive verb To fasten with a wedge, or with wedges.
- transitive verb (Pottery) To cut, as clay, into wedgelike masses, and work by dashing together, in order to expel air bubbles, etc.
- noun A piece of metal, or other hard material, thick at one end, and tapering to a thin edge at the other, used in splitting wood, rocks, etc., in raising heavy bodies, and the like. It is one of the six elementary machines called the
mechanical powers . SeeIllust. of Mechanical powers, underMechanical . - noun (Geom.) A solid of five sides, having a rectangular base, two rectangular or trapezoidal sides meeting in an edge, and two triangular ends.
- noun A mass of metal, especially when of a wedgelike form.
- noun Anything in the form of a wedge, as a body of troops drawn up in such a form.
- noun Cant, Cambridge Univ., Eng. The person whose name stands lowest on the list of the classical tripos; -- so called after a person (
Wedge wood) who occupied this position on the first list of 1828. - noun (Golf) A golf club having an iron head with the face nearly horizontal, used for lofting the golf ball at a high angle, as when hitting the ball out of a sand trap or the rough.
- noun (Mach. & Carpentry) See under
Fox . - noun (Geom.) the portion of a sphere included between two planes which intersect in a diameter.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- 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 (Wikipedia article). - noun A piece (of food etc.) having this shape.
- noun archaic A flank of cavalry acting to split some portion of an opposing army, charging in an inverted V formation.
- noun golf A type of
iron club used for short, high trajectories.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
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Examples
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MARCIANO: Well, we've been throwing around the term wedge and rope tornados quite a bit.
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MADISON: And I also think that evangelicals are on the margin of this political season, and Dobson is trying to figure a way of how they can get their value, what we called wedge issues four years ago, back into the political discourse.
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Not quite what we call a wedge tornado, but that is what we call a wedge tornado right there.
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A city that just really took a direct hit from what they call a wedge tornado.
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The one that hit Greensburg was a very large, what they call a wedge tornado, and it caused a lot of destruction.
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Look how wide -- that's what we call a wedge tornado.
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They were involved in efforts to remove the poll tax, voting rights and a lot of other things before they worked their way up to what we refer to as the wedge, the Brown case, which they say now with the Brown case, that Thurgood Marshall dismantled the system of American apartheid.
Thurgood Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench 1993
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So, while potentially effective with white voters in the short term, immigration wedge politics are also giving birth to another kind of wedge, the long term wedge born of the "I" words Republican presidential candidates so love to chant - in English.
Roberto Lovato: The Republican Univision Debate and the Rise of the "I" Word 2008
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Hemmed in by the 20ema on the weekly charts, the only sensible thing to do is sell just below it targeting 1.0400 or buy around 1.0200 but price is forming a short term wedge which is not a favorable price action formation to be trading, especially since we are over 80% into it so risk is increasing while reward is decreasing as the formation continues on.
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Estimating the effects on behaviour of a tax wedge is a balck art; there's no valid way of doing it statistically, because you are comparing to a counterfactual.
Social Security Privatization, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
yarb commented on the word wedge
Wedged matchsticks, Visitor,
lurk at the back of
the serene smile.
- Peter Reading, In State, from Fiction, 1979
June 26, 2008