Fork

How to spell fork

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fork

What does fork mean?

1. nounA handled implement with two or more prongs, used for lifting and eating food.
2. nounA point where a road, path, or river divides into two or more branches.
3. verbTo divide into two or more separate branches or directions.

Fork in a sentence

• noun

  She set a clean fork beside each plate.

• noun

  Turn left at the fork in the road past the old mill.

• verb

  The trail will fork just beyond the bridge.

• noun

  He speared a piece of pasta with his fork.

• noun

  The river reaches a wide fork below the valley.

• verb

  Developers can fork the project and continue it independently.

Where does fork come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin furca, which named a two-pronged pitchfork or forked stake used on farms. It entered Old English as 'forca' or 'force', referring to agricultural and digging implements long before it ever described a thing on a dining table. The small eating fork was a comparatively late arrival, becoming common in English homes only from around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by which time the older sense was firmly established. The same Latin furca also gave several Romance languages their words for fork, such as French 'fourche' and Italian 'forca', and even survives in the geometrical term 'bifurcate', meaning to split into two branches. Because the spelling is short and phonetic, the main trap for writers is simply the silent help of nothing at all: it is just four plain letters, with no hidden vowel or doubled consonant.

How the word is built

• fork (from Latin furca: a two-pronged farm tool)