Other forms: lunges, lunged, lunging, lungeing
To lunge is to make a sudden forward thrust. Lunge at him, lunged forward, a desperate lunge.
It commits the whole body forward, which is what makes it powerful and what makes it hard to recover from — in fencing the lunge is the fundamental attack and the recovery is drilled as hard as the strike. As an exercise, lunges work one leg at a time. Note that the word comes from the French for lengthening.
1verblungeTo make a sudden forward thrust.
“The dog lunged at the postman, but its lead held it back.”
2nounexerciseAn exercise stepping forward onto one leg.
“For the warm-up, the trainer had us do squats and lunges across the gym.”
lunge is a sudden thrust.
French allonge means a lengthening, from allonger, to stretch out, from Latin longus. Long, elongate and prolong come from the same length.
Latin
longare
Vulgar Latin
*allongare
Old French
alonge
French
allonge
English, today
lunge
From French allonge, from Old French alonge, from alongier, from Vulgar Latin allongare, from ad + Latin longare, from Latin longus. a doublet of allonge.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire