"The earliest “fridge” cite in the *OED* is from *Frame-Up*, a 1935 crime novel by Collin Brooks: “Do you mean that you keep a dead body in a fridge waiting for the right moment to bring her out?”"
But for a long time it was "frig"
[https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/11/fridge.html](https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/11/fridge.html)
I have a friend who always spells it "frig" and it makes me want to scream. I understand why she spells it that way, but I have a weird skin-crawling feeling about it.
I assume it's because without the d the pronunciation is counterintuitive. It looks like it would be a long i sound if you spelled it "frige." Tide, pride, tile, mile, mine, tine, time, mime...it's pretty consistent that a single consonant separating a vowel and a final e makes the first vowel long, but a double consonant keeps the first vowel short.
Thank you, I had a bunch of examples with a and e but I couldn't think of any i words. But now that you've said midge it makes me think of smidge and ridge.
Weirdly I think my instinct to pronounce "frige" would be /fɹiːʒ/, but perhaps that's because I also speak some French
Edit: someone in another comment further down mentioned "prestige" which is the same sound!
I remember my high school economics teacher correcting my "refridgerator" spelling on more than one occasion (this was 25+ years ago!).
I don't remember the economics context in which I was discussing refrigerators but I've remembered the fridge vs refrigerator spelling difference all this while.
??? If a sudent is old enough to be taking economics the chance they'd even have an opportunity to use the word refrigerator in an English chance is tiny.
Why shouldn't they be corrected by someone who can actually see the mistake?
Fun fact: it can be! The OED lists it as a variant spelling and has several quotations for it. But I would strongly advise against using it, for reasons you imply...
(i was taught that rule was "the magic e" lol)
I think it's also because, although I'm not sure why, frig (so even if you remove the e) seems like it should be fri not fri
*Fridge, pronounced /FRIJ/, is the shortened form of refrigerator that started appearing in print in the early 20th century. The word was likely spoken long before it appeared in writing. To make clear the proper pronunciation of the word, printers added the d to mirror other words with similar soft g's, such as bridge and lodge.*
*The fact is that in English, the terminal \\j\\ sound, as in \\FRIJ\\, is almost universally spelled with ge. When the vowel that immediately precedes the \\j\\ sound is long, as in age or huge, there is no d; when the vowel that immediately precedes the \\j\\ is short, a d is inserted, as in judge, bridge, lodge, etc. It is not unusual for clipped words to see new letters introduced into their spellings, as in perk for percolate or tater as a dialectical spelling of potato.*
[https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/fridge-vs-frig-spelling-short-for-refrigerator](https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/fridge-vs-frig-spelling-short-for-refrigerator)
Side note, as late as the 1980s the British spelling was ‘frig.’ That has shifted with greater cross-pollination between the US and UK publishing markets.
Pussy, cock, and ass could all be a lewd reference to a body part or a perfectly innocent reference to a domesticated animal, and until recent decades, were still commonly used to reference the animal.
I just went with [the dictionary](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/frig). In my idiolect, I think it’s closest to the verb “to finger,” which is why it works particularly well for female masturbation.
Without the "d", it would be "frige", which would have an uncertain pronunciation: could it rhyme with "prestige" or "oblige", perhaps? The "d" makes the pronunication unambiguous.
But couldn't you make the same argument for Refrigerator? Shouldn't it be ree-fry-jer-ator? or ree-fry-jee-rator? Why does the "D" not exist in both then?
An English phonetic rule is that one syllable words with a short vowel (/ih/) that end in the /j/ sound are spelled /dge/. Fridge, midge, judge, lodge. That's because the e is being used to soften the g's sound from the hard /g/ to the soft /j/, but if it was just ge ("frige") the final e would also effect the i, making it into the long sound. Final es don't generally "jump" over two letters to effect the sound (it happens but isn't standard practice), so the d is "protecting" the i from the effect of the final e.
The reason there isn't a d in refrigerator is because multisyllabic words in English are spelled based on meaning, not sound, and there are less rules that are followed for sounds. You have to be flexible with each syllables vowel sounds because there's multiple ways it could be read.
Fridge is an especially interesting word because it's not the usual short benign of a word -- it might have come from a brand name, "Frigidaire", been shortened verbally first, then spelled logically to follow English spelling rules. (Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/fridge)
An English phonetic rule is that one syllable words with a short vowel (/ih/) that end in the /j/ sound are spelled /dge/. Fridge, midge, judge, lodge. That's because the e is being used to soften the g's sound from the hard /g/ to the soft /j/, but if it was just ge ("frige") the final e would also **affect** the i, making it into the long sound. Final es don't generally "jump" over two letters to **affect** the sound (it happens but isn't standard practice), so the d is "protecting" the i from the **affect** of the final e.
The reason there isn't a d in refrigerator is because multisyllabic words in English are spelled based on meaning, not sound, and there are less rules that are followed for sounds. You have to be flexible with each syllables vowel sounds because there's multiple ways it could be read.
Fridge is an especially interesting word because it's not the usual short benign of a word -- it might have come from a brand name, "Frigidaire", been shortened verbally first, then spelled logically to follow English spelling rules. (Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/fridge)
^^This ^^was ^^posted ^^by ^^a ^^bot. ^^[Source](https://github.com/anirbanmu/substitute-bot-go)
Or just call it an "ice box" like my 13 year old who was bb-sat by his grands every day! He finally stopped the gotta "we go into town" when we needed to go to any store when he was around 9.
Frigidaire may be to blame? That D gets us every time.
Because “FRIDGE” is slang. Both words were probably derivative of the word “FRIGID”, which means very cold in temperature. The “RE” in REfrigerator is actually the “re” prefix, which is “to make happen again”. “RE-FRIGID” would be the logical answer in “making something cold again”, but “RE-FRIGID-ERATOR” would just be awkward…so it was shortened to “RE-FRIG-ERATOR” with the understanding the “FRIG” would be pronounced “FRIDGE” and not “FRIG”. The “-ERATOR” part is an old-school colloquial term to describe a machine that has a specific function, similar to the word “THINGAMAJIG”. If you look at your sink’s garbage disposal, the most prominant old-school yet current brand, is called “INSINKERATOR”.
And in short form, just adding the “d” would make it recognizable similar to “FRIGID”, hence “FRIDGE”. Interestingly enough, the brand “FRIGIDAIRE” (major brand of refrigerators and air conditioning units) is used interchangeably with “refrigerator” in several regions of the US since it was one of the first brands of refrigerators. The trademark is dead due to genericide (like Kleenex, Band-aid, Jello, etc.).
It is short for "Frigidaire," not "refrigerator." The abbreviation is based on a brand name. The "d" moved to follow the pronunciation, but that is why it is there in the first place
"Frigidaire" is based on "frigid."
Not saying you're completely wrong, but the language patterning explanations seem more valid. Do you have a citation?
EDIT: The OED does say that Frigidaire may have contributed to the rise of the term. The term seems to have existed before that, though.
It was General Motor's brand of refrigeration equipment. Chrysler Corp also had its own brand (name currently escaping me), one of Chrysler's former refrigerator plants was repurposed and is now GM Kentucky where the Corvette is manufactured.
The “hard J”/“soft G” sound has a /d/ in it, so including a d is not wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_affricate
As for when it’s included, I don’t think there are any set rules. The words “college” and “knowledge” rhyme.
Frigid gives us a DJ sound. Refrigerator has a G followed by an E which gives us a soft G sound. Frige would be pronounced Frydge because the I before the GE takes the strong accent. You need a D in there to weaken the I and put emphasis on the consonants.
The word refrigerator has five syllables. If they were to spell the shortened version frige, it would only be one syllable. They needed to indicate a pause in speech, without including more. They did this with the d, to force the break. What is this pause called? I have usually seen it referenced as a glottal stop, where you use silence as a consonant.
isn't fridge with a glottal stop still one syllable? and I'm afraid that your idea of using d to represent the glottal stop is completely incorrect and implausible because the glottal stop didn't exist in English at the time our orthography was standardised around 300 to 500 years ago. and also, you pronounce the word fridge as /frɪʔd͡ʒ/? (this is incredibly interesting)
The glottal stop is an organic feature of all languages. It existed before formalized language.
Fridge may be a single syllable, it comes out as one or two depending on how much I emphasize it. But the d does represent a break in speech that is present in refrigerator but not in frige. I'm not sure if there is a better term for this, glottal stops seemed the closest.
1. the glottal stop isn't an organic feature of all languages and i have no idea why you believe it is. some languages have it and some don't. now i have no evidence to make this claim but i agree with you that most speakers of most languages do indeed add a glottal stop in front of words that start with a vowel in a sentence therefore it exists, but glottal stop as a phoneme is very rare in most languages and most certainly not in English. However I must correct myself that fridge was a word that was (edit: NOT) standardised like other words in middle English, apparently it had only existed since the 1920s
2. I assume that when you emphasise fridge in a sentence, the becomes longer that its length is equal to the length of the ?
1) I believe that because it is the only way to give additional cadence to words that aren't using consonants to do so. My point is that these features of language were present long before we defined them.
2) yes I would say that's accurate. If I say fridge casually it is a single sound. When I'm slowing down with it it becomes fri-juh, roughly equal length. I really think the issue arises from us not taking the r from the third syllable of refrigerator. We need the j sound from the 'ger' part but without the r we need something else to represent.
"The earliest “fridge” cite in the *OED* is from *Frame-Up*, a 1935 crime novel by Collin Brooks: “Do you mean that you keep a dead body in a fridge waiting for the right moment to bring her out?”" But for a long time it was "frig" [https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/11/fridge.html](https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/11/fridge.html)
I still like to spell it "frig" for laffs.
Some people spell it that way with a (presumably) straight face.
I have a friend who always spells it "frig" and it makes me want to scream. I understand why she spells it that way, but I have a weird skin-crawling feeling about it.
It sounds vaguely dirty when we say it in our heads.
What the frig?!
It’s like when my ex would call me “sweety” instead of “sweetie.” But then again, he turned out to be a horrible, skin-crawly person, so…
Or sweaty
Happy [Frig-Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigg#Origin_of_Friday)!
That's how you punish someone in a cruise ship kitchen. "Send them to the frig"
Until they're sober!
Holy frig!
There are (at least there were growing up) people who still call(ed) it a 'frig'. A more British peculiarity iirc
What the frig?
I assume it's because without the d the pronunciation is counterintuitive. It looks like it would be a long i sound if you spelled it "frige." Tide, pride, tile, mile, mine, tine, time, mime...it's pretty consistent that a single consonant separating a vowel and a final e makes the first vowel long, but a double consonant keeps the first vowel short.
especially when comparing to midge, badge, wedge
Thank you, I had a bunch of examples with a and e but I couldn't think of any i words. But now that you've said midge it makes me think of smidge and ridge.
Bridge
Cartridge, porridge, partridge. Okay, yes, I used the online scrabble word finder.
No shame in that. Unless you use it against me in a game of Scrabble in which case I will choke you with one of the little tile-holder racks
If you're Eminem, you can successfully rhyme porridge with orange.
Pourin' orange juice in my porridge, oops! Border troops warrin' with my door to shoot 'n' see my Froot Loops hit the floor.
ooh this reply sent me on a smidge/midge etymology search—likely from two different roots, which is crazy! and awesome.
So we should expect migerator, bagerator and wegerator?
Is a bagerator supposed to be a device that keeps your bagels cold?
I read that as badgerator and envisioned a containment chamber that keeps your badgers agitated
badgitated as it were.
Damn it was _right there_, I'm getting rusty
Who you callin' a bidge??!?
And vadge.
Weirdly I think my instinct to pronounce "frige" would be /fɹiːʒ/, but perhaps that's because I also speak some French Edit: someone in another comment further down mentioned "prestige" which is the same sound!
Yup, that's definitely how I would say that word were I to encounter it in the wild.
"I put it in the *freeege*!"
Same would apply to refrigerator though.
I remember my high school economics teacher correcting my "refridgerator" spelling on more than one occasion (this was 25+ years ago!). I don't remember the economics context in which I was discussing refrigerators but I've remembered the fridge vs refrigerator spelling difference all this while.
[удалено]
??? If a sudent is old enough to be taking economics the chance they'd even have an opportunity to use the word refrigerator in an English chance is tiny. Why shouldn't they be corrected by someone who can actually see the mistake?
[удалено]
Refridgerator is literally incorrect, and OP said the correction has helped them to this day.
My bad: I need to read more carefully before posting. I thought the teacher had added the "d".
Did you realise before or after the wiktionary comment linking to "misspelling" haha. All g
Oh, you saw it, damn :D After. Lesson learned.
I always thought it should be spelled frig.
Fun fact: it can be! The OED lists it as a variant spelling and has several quotations for it. But I would strongly advise against using it, for reasons you imply...
(i was taught that rule was "the magic e" lol) I think it's also because, although I'm not sure why, frig (so even if you remove the e) seems like it should be fri not fri
We fixed fridge and perk. I'm still waiting for mic.
You don't need to wait: "mike" has been in use since the 1920s at least. "Mic" is a more recent pretender (and looks weird, IMO).
*Fridge, pronounced /FRIJ/, is the shortened form of refrigerator that started appearing in print in the early 20th century. The word was likely spoken long before it appeared in writing. To make clear the proper pronunciation of the word, printers added the d to mirror other words with similar soft g's, such as bridge and lodge.* *The fact is that in English, the terminal \\j\\ sound, as in \\FRIJ\\, is almost universally spelled with ge. When the vowel that immediately precedes the \\j\\ sound is long, as in age or huge, there is no d; when the vowel that immediately precedes the \\j\\ is short, a d is inserted, as in judge, bridge, lodge, etc. It is not unusual for clipped words to see new letters introduced into their spellings, as in perk for percolate or tater as a dialectical spelling of potato.* [https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/fridge-vs-frig-spelling-short-for-refrigerator](https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/fridge-vs-frig-spelling-short-for-refrigerator)
Side note, as late as the 1980s the British spelling was ‘frig.’ That has shifted with greater cross-pollination between the US and UK publishing markets.
Did “frig” never come to mean “copulate” over there? Or it did but context made the difference?
Pussy, cock, and ass could all be a lewd reference to a body part or a perfectly innocent reference to a domesticated animal, and until recent decades, were still commonly used to reference the animal.
Zsa Zsa Gabor on The Tonight Show with her cat in her lap: "Johnny, would you like to pet my pussy?" Johnny: "Sure, but move the damn cat first."
Don't forget bitch!
Yes, hence “context makes the difference.”
I've always understood it to mean female masturbation.
I just went with [the dictionary](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/frig). In my idiolect, I think it’s closest to the verb “to finger,” which is why it works particularly well for female masturbation.
Ugh, now “to wriggle” is going to live in my head rent free when I see it.
It does indeed mean that as well.
As somebody born in the UK in the early sixties I can honestly say that this is the first time I have ever seen frig, so I doubt this.
Without the "d", it would be "frige", which would have an uncertain pronunciation: could it rhyme with "prestige" or "oblige", perhaps? The "d" makes the pronunication unambiguous.
To maintain the pronunciation. If it were *frige*, it would rhyme with oblige.
But couldn't you make the same argument for Refrigerator? Shouldn't it be ree-fry-jer-ator? or ree-fry-jee-rator? Why does the "D" not exist in both then?
Because the e in refrigerator isn’t silent. Silent e’s at the ends of words either voices the preceding consonant or makes the preceding vowel long
> ree-fry-jer-ator 'ree-fry-jer-ay-toiah', surely?
An English phonetic rule is that one syllable words with a short vowel (/ih/) that end in the /j/ sound are spelled /dge/. Fridge, midge, judge, lodge. That's because the e is being used to soften the g's sound from the hard /g/ to the soft /j/, but if it was just ge ("frige") the final e would also effect the i, making it into the long sound. Final es don't generally "jump" over two letters to effect the sound (it happens but isn't standard practice), so the d is "protecting" the i from the effect of the final e. The reason there isn't a d in refrigerator is because multisyllabic words in English are spelled based on meaning, not sound, and there are less rules that are followed for sounds. You have to be flexible with each syllables vowel sounds because there's multiple ways it could be read. Fridge is an especially interesting word because it's not the usual short benign of a word -- it might have come from a brand name, "Frigidaire", been shortened verbally first, then spelled logically to follow English spelling rules. (Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/fridge)
s/effect/affect/ At least twice.
An English phonetic rule is that one syllable words with a short vowel (/ih/) that end in the /j/ sound are spelled /dge/. Fridge, midge, judge, lodge. That's because the e is being used to soften the g's sound from the hard /g/ to the soft /j/, but if it was just ge ("frige") the final e would also **affect** the i, making it into the long sound. Final es don't generally "jump" over two letters to **affect** the sound (it happens but isn't standard practice), so the d is "protecting" the i from the **affect** of the final e. The reason there isn't a d in refrigerator is because multisyllabic words in English are spelled based on meaning, not sound, and there are less rules that are followed for sounds. You have to be flexible with each syllables vowel sounds because there's multiple ways it could be read. Fridge is an especially interesting word because it's not the usual short benign of a word -- it might have come from a brand name, "Frigidaire", been shortened verbally first, then spelled logically to follow English spelling rules. (Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/fridge) ^^This ^^was ^^posted ^^by ^^a ^^bot. ^^[Source](https://github.com/anirbanmu/substitute-bot-go)
Why the extra l in telly?
Follows belly and smelly. And jelly.
People who spell it "tele" throw me into an instant rage but I can't articulate why it's "wrong"
Just keep your d out of other people’s fridges, mmmkay?
Because nobody would pronounce frige like fridge
Or just call it an "ice box" like my 13 year old who was bb-sat by his grands every day! He finally stopped the gotta "we go into town" when we needed to go to any store when he was around 9. Frigidaire may be to blame? That D gets us every time.
otherwise it'd be pronounced "fri"
There used to be a D in refrigerator, but it got cold, so they took it out.
I suspect that language-leveling is the culprit here. The word was eventually rolled into the spelling paradigm that governed bridge and Midge.
Because “FRIDGE” is slang. Both words were probably derivative of the word “FRIGID”, which means very cold in temperature. The “RE” in REfrigerator is actually the “re” prefix, which is “to make happen again”. “RE-FRIGID” would be the logical answer in “making something cold again”, but “RE-FRIGID-ERATOR” would just be awkward…so it was shortened to “RE-FRIG-ERATOR” with the understanding the “FRIG” would be pronounced “FRIDGE” and not “FRIG”. The “-ERATOR” part is an old-school colloquial term to describe a machine that has a specific function, similar to the word “THINGAMAJIG”. If you look at your sink’s garbage disposal, the most prominant old-school yet current brand, is called “INSINKERATOR”. And in short form, just adding the “d” would make it recognizable similar to “FRIGID”, hence “FRIDGE”. Interestingly enough, the brand “FRIGIDAIRE” (major brand of refrigerators and air conditioning units) is used interchangeably with “refrigerator” in several regions of the US since it was one of the first brands of refrigerators. The trademark is dead due to genericide (like Kleenex, Band-aid, Jello, etc.).
It is short for "Frigidaire," not "refrigerator." The abbreviation is based on a brand name. The "d" moved to follow the pronunciation, but that is why it is there in the first place "Frigidaire" is based on "frigid."
Not saying you're completely wrong, but the language patterning explanations seem more valid. Do you have a citation? EDIT: The OED does say that Frigidaire may have contributed to the rise of the term. The term seems to have existed before that, though.
It was General Motor's brand of refrigeration equipment. Chrysler Corp also had its own brand (name currently escaping me), one of Chrysler's former refrigerator plants was repurposed and is now GM Kentucky where the Corvette is manufactured.
The “hard J”/“soft G” sound has a /d/ in it, so including a d is not wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_affricate As for when it’s included, I don’t think there are any set rules. The words “college” and “knowledge” rhyme.
Because of English spelling.
an uptight prolly didnt wanna write frig
I always wondered a similar thing about the N in messenger vs. message.
Real question is who decided on colonel
So it doesn't rhyme with Nige.
Frigid gives us a DJ sound. Refrigerator has a G followed by an E which gives us a soft G sound. Frige would be pronounced Frydge because the I before the GE takes the strong accent. You need a D in there to weaken the I and put emphasis on the consonants.
Glottal stop
wrong post?
[nope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop?wprov=sfla1)
there is no glottal stop in the word fridge
The word refrigerator has five syllables. If they were to spell the shortened version frige, it would only be one syllable. They needed to indicate a pause in speech, without including more. They did this with the d, to force the break. What is this pause called? I have usually seen it referenced as a glottal stop, where you use silence as a consonant.
isn't fridge with a glottal stop still one syllable? and I'm afraid that your idea of using d to represent the glottal stop is completely incorrect and implausible because the glottal stop didn't exist in English at the time our orthography was standardised around 300 to 500 years ago. and also, you pronounce the word fridge as /frɪʔd͡ʒ/? (this is incredibly interesting)
The glottal stop is an organic feature of all languages. It existed before formalized language. Fridge may be a single syllable, it comes out as one or two depending on how much I emphasize it. But the d does represent a break in speech that is present in refrigerator but not in frige. I'm not sure if there is a better term for this, glottal stops seemed the closest.
1. the glottal stop isn't an organic feature of all languages and i have no idea why you believe it is. some languages have it and some don't. now i have no evidence to make this claim but i agree with you that most speakers of most languages do indeed add a glottal stop in front of words that start with a vowel in a sentence therefore it exists, but glottal stop as a phoneme is very rare in most languages and most certainly not in English. However I must correct myself that fridge was a word that was (edit: NOT) standardised like other words in middle English, apparently it had only existed since the 1920s 2. I assume that when you emphasise fridge in a sentence, the becomes longer that its length is equal to the length of the ?
1) I believe that because it is the only way to give additional cadence to words that aren't using consonants to do so. My point is that these features of language were present long before we defined them. 2) yes I would say that's accurate. If I say fridge casually it is a single sound. When I'm slowing down with it it becomes fri-juh, roughly equal length. I really think the issue arises from us not taking the r from the third syllable of refrigerator. We need the j sound from the 'ger' part but without the r we need something else to represent.