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blade

UK/bleɪd/US/bleɪd/
nounB1Very common — you will meet it every day · #2,066 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: blades

A blade is the cutting part of a knife or a tool. A sharp blade, the blade of the knife, change the blade.

It extends to anything flat and thin: the blade of an oar, a shoulder blade, a blade of grass. The oldest meaning is the leaf, which is why grass has blades at all rather than the other way round.

Kinmichi II / Takamoto Hidemune · Public domain

Definitions of blade

  1. 1nounbladeThe cutting part of a knife or a tool.B1

    “Be careful: the blade of this knife is very sharp.”

blade is a part.

Where it comes from

Old English blaed meant a leaf, from a Germanic root; the cutting sense came later.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *bʰleh₃-

  2. Middle English

    blade

  3. English, today

    blade

Built from

  • *bʰleh₃- · Proto-Indo-European — to thrive, bloom

From Middle English blade, from Middle English blad. From Middle English blade, blad, from Old English blæd (“leaf”), from Proto-West Germanic blad, from Proto-Germanic bladą, from Proto-Indo-European bʰl̥h₃-o-to-m, from bʰleh₃- (“to thrive, bloom”). Cognate with West Frisian bled, German Blatt, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish blad, Faroese and Icelandic blað, Irish bláth (“flower”), Welsh blodyn (“flower”), xto pält, txb pilta (“leaf”), Albanian fletë (“leaf”). Similar usage in Sägeblatt (“saw blade”) literally “saw leaf”. a doublet of blat. More at blow.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

blade in the wild

  • Most modern knives have fixed or folding blades, with styles varying by maker and country.

    Knife

  • There are numerous types of hand saws and mechanical saws, and different types of blades and cuts.

    Saw

  • For example, when performing surgery under MRI guidance, steel blades are unusable (the blades would be drawn to the magnets and would also cause image artifacts).

    Scalpel

  • Scalpel blades are usually individually packed in sterile pouches but are also offered non-sterile.

    Scalpel

  • A blade is the sharp, cutting portion of a tool, weapon, or machine, specifically designed to puncture, chop, slice, or scrape surfaces or materials.

    Blade

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.