cadge [LME] In Middle English cadge seems to have been a variant of catch and had a sense something like ‘to fasten’. In early 17th-century English dialect it developed a sense ‘to carry about’. This was formed from the noun cadger, which had existed since the late 15th century and meant, in northern English and Scots, ‘a pedlar or dealer who travelled between town and country’. From this developed the verb sense ‘to hawk or peddle’ and eventually the modern sense, ‘to ask for something that you are not strictly entitled to’. Codger [M18th], meaning an elderly man, is probably a variant of cadger.