Fridge

How to spell fridge

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fridge

What does fridge mean?

1. nounAn insulated cabinet or appliance that keeps food and drink cold.

Fridge in a sentence

• She put the leftover curry in the fridge overnight.

• The milk had gone off because the fridge was set too warm.

Where does fridge come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Fridge is a twentieth-century clipping of refrigerator, the household cooling appliance. Refrigerator itself comes from the Latin verb refrigerare, meaning 'to make cool again' or 'to chill', built from re- (here intensifying or restoring) and frigerare, which derives from frigus, the Latin noun for cold or frost. When English speakers shortened the long word in casual speech, they faced a spelling problem: writing 'frige' would suggest a hard g, so a -d- was slipped in to guarantee the soft 'j' sound, mirroring words like bridge and ridge. The form is recorded from the early 1900s and quickly became the everyday term while refrigerator stayed formal. The same frigus root chills the words frigid and refrigerate, and that inserted -d- (absent from the parent refrigerator) is precisely the spelling trap that catches writers off guard.

How the word is built

• clipping of re-frige-rator (Latin frigus, cold), with an inserted -d- before -ge to lock in the soft 'j' sound