Other forms: trudging, trudged, trudges
To trudge is to walk heavily and wearily. Each step an effort, and a long way still to go.
The weight is what defines it, whether it comes from tiredness, snow, mud or simply not wanting to arrive. It takes through, up or home. As a noun, a trudge is a long tiring walk. English keeps a useful set of walking verbs, and trudge sits beside plod, which is slow and steady, and traipse, which adds pointlessness to the effort.
1verbtrudgeTo walk slowly and heavily, with effort.
“They trudged up the hill in silence.”
2nounlongA long, tiring walk.
“It was a real trudge back to the car.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Trudging began in snowshoes. The earliest sense, in the middle of the sixteenth century, was to walk on them, probably from a Scandinavian word for a snowshoe, which explains the weight of the step.
Built from
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”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA