Budge

How to spell budge

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce budge

What does budge mean?

1. verbTo move slightly, or to make something shift from a fixed position, often used in the negative.

Budge in a sentence

• The heavy wardrobe would not budge no matter how hard they pushed.

• The manager refused to budge on the agreed deadline.

Where does budge come from?

Language of origin: French

Budge comes from the French verb bouger, meaning to move or to stir, which English picked up in the middle of the sixteenth century. The French word descends from an unrecorded Vulgar Latin form bullicare, meaning to bubble up or to boil, a frequentative built on the Latin bullire, to boil (the same root that gives us 'boil' and 'ebullient'). The idea travelled from liquid bubbling and seething to the broader notion of restless movement, and finally to the small, grudging shift of position we mean today. In English it almost always appears in the negative, as in 'will not budge', because the word naturally describes resistance to movement rather than movement itself. The spelling keeps the soft -dge ending typical of short English words like 'fudge', 'nudge', and 'judge', where the silent d signals the soft g sound after a short vowel.

How the word is built

• budge (single root; from French bouger, to move or stir)