fledge

1. 1.

   feed, care for, and rear young birds for flight

   Broaderrear
2. 2.

   decorate with feathers

   “fledge an arrow”

   Synonymsflight

   Broaderdecorate
3. 3.

   grow feathers

   “The young sparrows are fledging already”

   Synonymsfeather

   Broadergrow

Other forms of fledge

past tense

fledged·

present participle

fledging·

third person

fledges·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about fledge

What does fledge mean?

fledge means "feed, care for, and rear young birds for flight". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in fledge?

fledge has 1 syllable: fledge. In IPA it is /ˈflɛdʒ/.

What is another word for fledge?

Close synonyms include flight, feather. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is fledge a common word?

fledge is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.