Dodge
verbTo avoid something or someone by a sudden quick movement, or to evade a duty or question cleverly.
How to spell dodge
5 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce dodge
What does dodge mean?
- verbTo avoid something or someone by a sudden quick movement, or to evade a duty or question cleverly.
- nounA clever or dishonest trick used to avoid something.
Dodge in a sentence
-
verb
He had to dodge the cyclist who swerved across the road.
-
noun
Claiming the trip as business was just a dodge to lower his bill.
-
verb
She tried to dodge the awkward question from the auditor.
-
noun
The new fee turned out to be a dodge for raising prices quietly.
Where does dodge come from?
Language of origin: Unknown
Dodge first appears in English in the middle of the 1500s, originally meaning to move quickly to and fro or to shift one's position evasively. Its ultimate origin is genuinely uncertain: no clear parent word survives in Old English or in a neighbouring language, and most authorities simply mark it as obscure. It may have begun as a dialectal or colloquial word imitating a quick, darting motion, which would fit how its meaning later widened from physical dodging to the figurative sense of evading a duty, a question, or a tax. By the 1600s the noun had developed, naming a clever trick or piece of evasion. The spelling settled with the -dge ending, the regular English way of writing the soft 'j' sound after a short vowel, the same pattern seen in 'badge', 'edge', and 'lodge'.
How the word is built
- dodge (single root; no productive prefix or suffix)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.