[wejd] 
| having the shape of a wedge. |
[wej] noun, verb, wedged, wedg⋅ing.| 1. | 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. |
| 8. | Optics. optical wedge. |
| 9. | haček. |
| 10. | Chiefly Coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island. a hero sandwich. |
| 11. | a wedge heel or shoe with such a heel. |
| 12. | to separate or split with or as if with a wedge (often fol. by open, apart, etc.): to wedge open a log. |
| 13. | to insert or fix with a wedge. |
| 14. | to pack or fix tightly: to wedge clothes into a suitcase. |
| 15. | to thrust, drive, fix, etc., like a wedge: He wedged himself through the narrow opening. |
| 16. | Ceramics. to pound (clay) in order to remove air bubbles. |
| 17. | to fell or direct the fall of (a tree) by driving wedges into the cut made by the saw. |
| 18. | to force a way like a wedge (usually fol. by in, into, through, etc.): The box won't wedge into such a narrow space. |
| wedge (wěj) n.
v. tr.
To become lodged or jammed. [Middle English wegge, from Old English wecg.] |
| wedged (wějd) adj.
|
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]