kludge
/klʌdʒ
/ /kluːdʒ /(also cludge) informal
noun
1An ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfil a particular purpose.On the corner of Eversholt Street and Euston is a St Pancras New Church, a neo-classical kludge which at the time of its construction in 1822 was the most expensive church building since St Paul's....
- The vertebrate eye does very well indeed, but it is a kludge.
- It wouldn't have been perfect, but it almost certainly would have been better than the kludge we're ending up with.
1.1 Computing A machine, system, or program that has been badly put together, especially a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.Google has struggled to maintain the integrity of its search results ever since, with recent kludges blocking millions of results....
- I speak as someone who's written code to do this, by the way - it always smelled like a kludge to me, and now I understand why.
- And it's hard to imagine any IS department tolerating kludges such as this.
verb [with object]
Improvise or put together from an ill-assorted collection of parts: Hugh had to kludge something together...
- The original network - I'm sure our technologists wouldn't like this - but it was kludged together through landlines
- I initially coded the blog's template by kludging together a lot of stuff without really knowing what I was doing.
- One can add a middle initial, but this is just kludging it.
Origin
1960s: invented word, perhaps influenced by bodge and fudge.