To bodge is to repair something clumsily and badly. Bodge the job, a bodged repair, bodge it together.
It is British and affectionate as often as it is critical — a bodge that holds is still a bodge. It is not the same as botch, though the two words are relatives and are constantly confused. A bodge job is a repair meant to last until a proper one.
1verbbodgeTo repair something clumsily and badly.
“He bodged the shelf with tape and a few bent nails, and it fell down within a week.”
bodge is a repairing.
Middle English bocchen meant to patch up, of uncertain origin. Botch is the same word by another line.
Old English
bōtettan — to improve, repair
Middle Dutch
botsen
Middle English
bocchen — to mend, patch up, repair
English, today
bodge
Built from
Middle English bocchen (“to mend, patch up, repair”), of uncertain origin. Perhaps from Middle Dutch botsen, butsen, boetsen (“to repair, patch”) (Dutch botsen (“to strike, beat, knock together”)), related to Old High German bōzan (“to beat”), See beat; or perhaps from Old English bōtettan (“to improve, repair”), Old English bōtian (“to get better”). Compare botch. More at boot. Perhaps from boggle. Perhaps from botch (“patch, or a measurement of capacity equivalent to half a peck”). There is a hypothesis that bodges, defined as rough sacks of corn, closely resembled packages of finished goods the bodgers carried when they left the forest or workshop. Another hypothesis (dating from 1879) is that bodger was a corruption of badger, as similarly to the behaviour of a badger, the bodger dwelt in the woods and seldom emerged until evenings.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA