/klüj/
[from the German klug, clever]
n. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software. (A long-ago Datamation article by Jackson Granholme said:
"An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole.")
- n. A clever programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an expedient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs. Often involves ad-hockery and verges on being a crock. In fact, the TMRC Dictionary defined kludge as "a crock that works".
- n. Something that works for the wrong reason.
vt. To insert a kluge into a program.
"I've kluged this routine to get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better way."
[WPI] n. A feature that is implemented in a rude manner.
Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant spelling kludge. Reports from old farts are consistent that kluge was the original spelling, and that kludge arose by mutation sometime in the early 1970s. Some people who encountered the word first in print or on-line jumped to the reasonable but incorrect conclusion that the word should be pronounced /kluhj/ (rhyming with sludge). The result of this tangled history is a mess; in 1991, many (perhaps even most) hackers pronounce the word correctly as /klooj/ but spell it incorrectly as kludge (compare the pronunciation drift of mung). Some observers consider this appropriate in view of its meaning.