wedged

1. 1
   verb

   Past tense and past participle of wedge.

   Commuters wedged themselves into the crowded subway car.

   A pebble had gotten wedged in the tread of her hiking boot.

   Note

   Most meanings take an object, often a reflexive one (commuters wedged themselves in), and they go easily into the passive: the box was wedged under the seat. The computing meaning is the exception: a program or server simply wedged, with no object, when it stopped responding, and that use is colloquial. The state it leaves behind is the slang adjective for stuck.

2. 2
   adjectiveslang

   Stuck in a state where it cannot continue without outside help, though it has not actually crashed.

   The build machine was wedged on a locked file and sat there for hours without failing or finishing.

   If the process is wedged, killing it and starting over is usually faster than waiting.

   Similarhung, stuck, frozen

   Note

   Programmers keep a distinction here: a crashed program has stopped, but a wedged one is still running and getting nowhere, often waiting for something that will never arrive, such as a lock or a network reply. Since a wedged machine may not even answer pings, the usual cure is to restart the stuck part. Being slang, it suits engineers' talk better than a formal report.

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