a piece of hard material with two principal faces meeting in a sharply acute angle, for raising, holding, or splitting objects by applying a pounding or driving force, as from a hammer. Compare machine(def. 3b).
2.
a piece of anything of like shape: a wedge of pie.
3.
a cuneiform character or stroke of this shape.
4.
Meteorology. (formerly) an elongated area of relatively high pressure.
5.
something that serves to part, split, divide, etc.: The quarrel drove a wedge into the party organization.
6.
Military. (formerly) a tactical formation generally in the form of a V with the point toward the enemy.
7.
Golf. a club with an iron head the face of which is nearly horizontal, for lofting the ball, esp. out of sand traps and high grass.
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.
wedged 1. To be stuck, incapable of proceeding without help. This is different from having crashed. If the system has crashed, it has become totally non-functioning. If the system is wedged, it is trying to do something but cannot make progress; it may be capable of doing a few things, but not be fully operational. For example, a process may become wedged if it deadlocks with another (but not all instances of wedging are deadlocks). See also gronk, locked up, hosed. 2. Often refers to humans suffering misconceptions. "He's totally wedged - he's convinced that he can levitate through meditation." 3. [Unix] Specifically used to describe the state of a TTY left in a losing state by abort of a screen-oriented program or one that has messed with the line discipline in some obscure way. There is some dispute over the origin of this term. It is usually thought to derive from a common description of recto-cranial inversion; however, it may actually have originated with older "hot-press" printing technology in which physical type elements were locked into type frames with wedges driven in by mallets. Once this had been done, no changes in the typesetting for that page could be made. [The Jargon File]
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Audio Help [wej] Pronunciation Key noun, verb, wedged, wedg·ing. 
