Other forms: patches, patched, patching
To patch something is to cover a hole with a piece of material. A square of denim ironed over a knee, a rubber patch glued onto a bike inner tube, a sheet of steel welded over the rust in a wing.
The patch is the piece itself as well: leather patches on the elbows of a jacket, an eye patch, the badge sewn on a scout's sleeve. Patch also means a small area that differs from what is around it — a patch of ice on the path, a patch of blue sky, a vegetable patch at the end of the garden. Stretch that into time and you get a bad patch or a rough patch, which is a difficult stretch of life rather than a place. Software is patched too, and a security patch closes a hole in exactly the way a puncture patch does. Patch up means to repair roughly, or to make peace: they patched things up over dinner.
1verbpatchTo cover a hole or a worn place with a piece of material.~2%
“He patched the tyre and pumped it up again.”
2nounmaterialA piece of material used to cover a hole.~31%
“There was a leather patch on each elbow.”
3nounareaA small area that is different from everything around it.~24%
“The car hit a patch of ice and spun.”
4noungroundA small piece of ground for growing things.~2%
“Everything on the plate came out of his own vegetable patch.”
5nounstretchA stretch of time of a particular kind, especially a difficult one.~2%
“She is going through a rough patch at work.”
6nounsoftwareA small piece of software that fixes a fault.~39%
“The patch fixes the bug that logged everybody out.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
patch is a repair.
Patch has never been pinned down. The best guess ties it to Middle English placche and Old English plaecc, a spot or a mark, from a Germanic word plakjo meaning spot or stain, with the l dropping out along the way — exactly as it did in pat, which used to be plat. The other guess is Old French pieche, a piece.
Old French
pieche
Proto-Germanic
*plakjō — spot, stain
Proto-West Germanic
*plakkju
Old English
*plæċċ
Middle English
pacche
English, today
patch
Built from
From Middle English pacche, of unknown origin. Perhaps an alteration of earlier Middle English placche (“patch, spot, piece of cloth”), from Old English plæċċ, pleċċ (“a spot, mark, patch”), from Proto-West Germanic plakkju, from Proto-Germanic plakjō (“spot, stain”). For the loss of l compare pat from Middle English platten. Germanic cognates would then include Middle English plecke, dialectal English pleck (“plot of ground, patch”), West Frisian plak (“place, spot”), Low German Plakk, Plakke (“spot, piece, patch”), Dutch plek (“spot, place, stain, patch”), Dutch plak (“piece, slab”), Swedish plagg (“garment”), Faroese plagg (“cloth, rag”). Or, possibly a variant of Old French pieche, dialectal variant of piece (“piece”). Compare also Old Occitan petaç (“patch”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA