Knife

How to spell knife

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce knife

What does knife mean?

1. nounA cutting tool or weapon with a sharpened blade fixed to a handle.

Knife in a sentence

• The chef sharpened the knife before slicing the vegetables.

• A sharp knife is safer than a blunt one.

Where does knife come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English cnif, meaning a cutting blade, which itself was borrowed from a Scandinavian source closely related to the Old Norse knifr. The same ancestral word survives across the northern languages, surfacing as kniv in modern Swedish and Danish. The opening 'kn' once represented a genuinely pronounced cluster, with both the k and the n sounded aloud, but English speakers gradually dropped the spoken k during the 1600s while writers stubbornly kept the letter on the page. That historical change is exactly why the modern spelling carries a silent k that catches people out. The plural shifts the f to v, giving 'knives', a relic of how Old English nouns once changed their final consonant.

How the word is built

• knif- (from Old English cnif: a blade)
• -e (silent final letter)