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1An ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfil a particular purpose.
‘It wouldn't have been perfect, but it almost certainly would have been better than the kludge we're ending up with.’
‘Such a database would be a kludge of existing databases; databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous data, and unreliable.’
‘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.’
1.1Computing A machine, system, or program that has been badly put together, especially a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.
‘It's a kludge, but at least the page loads normally now.’
‘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.’
‘Usually some mechanism exists to export and import data between a database and an SPC / SQC system - even if that mechanism is a kludge involving a text-file transfer.’
‘And it's hard to imagine any IS department tolerating kludges such as this.’
verb
[with object]informal
Improvise or put together from an ill-assorted collection of parts.
‘Hugh had to kludge something together’
‘The details aren't specific, and feel a little kludged.’
‘I initially coded the blog's template by kludging together a lot of stuff without really knowing what I was doing.’
‘The original network - I'm sure our technologists wouldn't like this - but it was kludged together through landlines’
‘Thus you either change the new code, or try and kludge the old code, or hack around the old code with a whole new bit.’
‘It's well worth taking the time to add extra comments and clean up any kludged code.’
‘So there is nothing that the Google desktop offers I can't already kludge.’
‘One can add a middle initial, but this is just kludging it.’
Origin
1960s: invented word, perhaps influenced by bodge and fudge.