Other forms: forks, forked, forking
A fork is the thing in your left hand at dinner — a handle with three or four sharp points for spearing food and holding it still. Lying in the drawer with the spoons, going into the dishwasher, dropped on the floor at exactly the wrong moment.
Anything that splits in two is a fork: the road forks at the church, and you take the left fork. The garden has a bigger, heavier one for turning soil, and the farmyard has a pitchfork for lifting hay. Chess players use it for a move where one piece attacks two at once — a knight fork wins you a rook. As a verb it means to divide, or to dig with a fork; and in fork out it means to pay, usually more than you meant to.
1nounforkThe eating tool with a handle and three or four sharp points.~36%
“He ate the last of the cake with a fork.”
Patterna knife and fork · eat with a fork · fork + noun (handle) · a forkful · fork sth over / into
2nounplaceThe place where a road, river or path splits in two, and either of the parts.~55%
“Take the right fork after the bridge.”
3verbdivideTo divide into two branches.~2%
“The path forks by the old gate.”
4nounchessIn chess, one move that attacks two pieces at the same time.~7%
“The knight fork cost him his queen.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 132 sentences found in the wild and placed 54 of them on a sense (78 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
FORK → a road that splits into points
Where a road splits, it is called a fork; the one on your table splits four times, into four sharp points for the food.
A fork was a farm tool and an instrument of punishment long before it was cutlery. Latin furca covered the pitchfork, the forked stake and the gallows; Old English took it in as forca, a forked instrument used to torture, and Middle English forke was a fork for digging. The native word it pushed out was ġeafle, which had meant fork all along.
Middle English
forke
English, today
fork
Built from
From Middle English forke. From Middle English forke (“digging fork”), from Old English force, forca (“forked instrument used to torture”), from Proto-West Germanic furkō (“fork”), from Latin furca (“pitchfork, forked stake; gallows, beam, stake, support post, yoke”), of uncertain origin. The Middle English - word was later reinforced by Anglo-Norman -, fro-nor forque (= Old French forche whence French fourche), also from the Latin. a doublet of fourche and furcate. Cognate also with frr forck (“fork”), Dutch vork (“fork”), Danish fork (“fork”), German Forke (“pitchfork”). Displaced native gafol, ġeafel, ġeafle (“fork”), from Old English -. In its primary sense of fork, Latin furca appears to be derived from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰerk(ʷ)-, ǵʰerg(ʷ)- (“fork”), although the development of the -c- is difficult to explain. In other senses this derivation is unlikely. For these, perhaps it is connected to Proto-Germanic furkaz, firkalaz (“stake, stick, pole, post”), from Proto-Indo-European perg- (“pole, post”). If so, this would relate the word to Old English forclas (“bolt”), Old Saxon ferkal (“lock, bolt, bar”), Old Norse forkr (“pole, staff, stick”), Norwegian fork (“stick, bat”), Swedish fork (“pole”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA