Fudge

How to spell fudge

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fudge

What does fudge mean?

1. nounA soft, rich sweet made by boiling sugar, butter, and milk together.
2. verbTo present or adjust something dishonestly or vaguely so as to avoid a clear commitment.

Fudge in a sentence

• noun

  She cut the chocolate fudge into neat little squares.

• verb

  The accountant tried to fudge the quarterly figures to hide the loss.

• noun

  The seaside shop sold tins of vanilla fudge to tourists.

• verb

  Politicians often fudge a direct answer when the question is awkward.

Where does fudge come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The origins of fudge are genuinely murky, which is fitting for a word that came to mean faking and bluffing. The verb sense, meaning to fit something together clumsily, to botch, or to fake, appears in the seventeenth century and is probably an alteration of an older English verb 'fadge', which meant to fit or to suit. A popular story links the exclamation 'fudge!' to a notoriously dishonest sea captain named Fudge, whose tall tales supposedly made his name a byword for nonsense, though this tale is itself hard to verify. The soft, sugary confection took the name only in late nineteenth century America, where college students made it, and one account claims the sweet was so named because early batches were really a 'fudged', or botched, attempt at caramel. Because no single thread can be proven, scholars treat the word's birth as uncertain. The plain four-letter spelling, with the soft g written as 'dge' after a short vowel, follows the same pattern as 'budge', 'judge', and 'nudge'.

How the word is built

• fudge (single root word, no prefix or suffix; origin uncertain)