Ridge

How to spell ridge

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ridge

What does ridge mean?

1. nounA long, narrow raised strip or crest, such as the top of a range of hills or the line where two roof slopes meet.
2. verbTo mark or form something with long, narrow raised lines.

Ridge in a sentence

• noun

  The hikers followed the rocky ridge all the way to the summit.

• verb

  The plough will ridge the soil into neat rows before planting.

• noun

  The roofer replaced the cracked tiles along the ridge of the house.

• verb

  Strong winds can ridge the surface of the dunes overnight.

Where does ridge come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English hrycg, which originally meant the back or spine of a person or animal. That sense of a raised central line running along a body was carried over to the natural world, so any long, narrow crest of land or a roof came to be called a ridge. The Old English form goes back to a Germanic root shared with the Dutch rug and the German Rücken, both still meaning 'back'. Over the centuries the spelling shifted from hrycg, losing its initial h sound, and the soft ending settled into the modern -dge, the same spelling pattern seen in bridge and edge. That -dge cluster is exactly the part that trips writers, since the single spoken 'j' sound is written with three letters.

How the word is built

• ridge (whole word from Old English hrycg, meaning the back or spine); no separable affixes