The word hedge is used in three quite different contexts:
- In gardening and agriculture, a hedge or hedgerow is a boundary formed by growing plants so that their limbs intertwine. This is the original meaning of the word.
- In gambling and finance, a hedge is a bet or investment taken to reduce loss if another bet or investment turns out unfavourably.
- In linguistics, hedges are intentionally non-comittal or ambiguous sentence fragments, such as "sort of" or "kind of".
