The peculiar thing about the word fridge is that it contains a d, while the word it stands for, refrigerator, does not. The original abbreviation of refrigerator was frig, a spelling used as early as 1926 and as recently as 1960. Beginning in the 1930s, however, the alternate form fridge started to appear, a spelling invented likely because the original frig form looked too much as if it should be pronounced with a hard g, that is, as if it rhymed with twig; such a pronunciation would simply not do, since frig, with a hard g, had been used since the late sixteenth century to mean masturbate. This problem was surmounted by the new spelling, fridge, because the idge ending has long been employed in English to represent a / sound, as in ridge and midge. The switch from frig to fridge may also have been facilitated by the fact that one popular brand of refrigerator—the Frigidaire—did contain a d in its name, a d that could be moved to a position before the g without too much difficulty. The manufacturers of the Frigidaire were, of course, playing on the word frigid when they invented their brand name, frigid being a word that derives, like refrigerate, from the Latin frigus, a noun meaning coldness.