Nudge

How to spell nudge

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce nudge

What does nudge mean?

1. verbTo push someone or something gently, often with the elbow, or to prompt a person quietly toward an action.
2. nounA gentle push or a subtle prompt intended to encourage a particular response.

Nudge in a sentence

• verb

  She had to nudge her colleague awake during the long meeting.

• noun

  A quiet nudge from her mentor was enough to make him apply for the job.

• verb

  A reminder email can nudge customers to renew before the deadline.

• noun

  The app sends a friendly nudge when your monthly budget runs low.

Where does nudge come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Nudge surfaced in English in the middle of the 1600s, and its exact parentage is genuinely uncertain, so it is best treated as a word of obscure but probably Scandinavian origin. The likeliest relatives are dialect words such as the Norwegian 'nugga' and 'nyggja', both carrying the sense of 'to push' or 'to rub against', and the spelling and meaning fit that family well. From the start it described a small, discreet push, especially the kind given with the elbow to catch someone's attention quietly. Over time the figurative sense grew, so that today one can nudge a person toward a decision without any physical contact at all, a usage popularised in recent decades by behavioural economics. The silent-looking 'dg' spelling, where the letter 'd' joins the soft 'g' to spell the single sound, is the small trap here, since the word sounds as though it could begin and end more simply than it is written.

How the word is built

• nudge (a single root verb of probable Scandinavian origin; no prefix or suffix)