trudge

Mid-16th century. Original meaning was somewhat idiomatic, meaning "to walk using snowshoes." Probably of Scandinavian origin, compare Icelandic þrúga (“snowshoe”), Norwegian truga (“snowshoe”) and dialectal Swedish trudja (“snowshoe”).

• (Received Pronunciation, US) IPA^(key): /tɹʌd͡ʒ/

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• Rhymes: -ʌd͡ʒ

trudge (plural trudges)

1. A tramp, i.e. a long and tiring walk.
   • 2020 September 9, Paul Clifton, “Heavy rainfall causes landslip in Hampshire: At the scene...”, in Rail, page 10:

     The morning after the landslip, with rain still pouring down, it was an unpleasant trudge through deep mud to get there.

trudge (third-person singular simple present trudges, present participle trudging, simple past and past participle trudged)

1. (intransitive) To walk wearily with heavy, slow steps.
   • 2014, Paul Salopek, Blessed. Cursed. Claimed., National Geographic (December 2014)

     This famous archaeological site marks the farthest limit of human migration out of Africa in the middle Stone Age—the outer edge of our knowledge of the cosmos. I trudge to the caves in a squall.

2. (transitive) To trudge along or over a route etc.

• trudger

• Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, Massachusetts, G.&C. Merriam Co., 1967
• “trudge”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.