Sledge

How to spell sledge

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sledge

What does sledge mean?

1. nounA vehicle mounted on runners for travelling over snow or ice, often pulled by dogs or by hand.
2. nounA large, heavy hammer swung with both hands to drive stakes, break stone, or demolish.

Sledge in a sentence

• The children hauled the wooden sledge up the snowy hill.

• He swung the heavy sledge to drive the fence post into the ground.

• The explorer loaded supplies onto the sledge before crossing the ice.

• The builder smashed the old wall with a single blow of the sledge.

Where does sledge come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

This single spelling actually unites two separate Germanic ancestors. The snow-vehicle sense arrived in the 1600s from the Middle Dutch sleedse, a sliding conveyance dragged over snow or ground, and it is a close cousin of the Dutch slee and English 'sled' and 'sleigh', all rooted in the idea of gliding smoothly. The heavy-hammer sense is much older and homegrown, descending from the Old English slecg, which simply meant a large striking tool, formed from the verb slean 'to strike or slay' (the same root that gives us 'slay' and 'sledgehammer'). Over time the two words converged on the identical written form, so today 'sledge' can mean either a runner-mounted vehicle or a massive driving hammer depending entirely on context. The soft -dge ending preserves the regular English way of writing a 'j' sound after a short vowel, as in 'edge', 'ledge' and 'badge', which is the small spelling cue worth remembering.

How the word is built

• sledge (single root; in the snow-vehicle sense from Middle Dutch sleedse 'sliding vehicle', and in the hammer sense from Old English slecg 'a striker')