Spoons

How to spell spoons

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce spoons

What does spoons mean?

1. nounEating or serving utensils each consisting of a small shallow bowl on a handle.

Spoons in a sentence

• She set out forks, knives, and spoons for the dinner party.

• The café ran out of clean spoons during the busy lunch rush.

Where does spoons come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from Old English 'spon', which originally meant a chip, splinter, or shaving of wood, the same humble sense preserved in related Germanic words. In early medieval kitchens such thin slivers of wood were used to scoop and eat, so the name gradually transferred from the raw chip to the shaped eating tool. The sense narrowed over the centuries until 'spoon' meant only the familiar utensil with a bowl and a handle, and the plural simply adds an -s. A close cousin survives in the Old Norse 'spann', and the woodworking origin still echoes in the way we talk about carving or whittling. Because the word is short and entirely regular, the only spelling point to remember is the double o, which holds the long vowel sound.

How the word is built

• spoon (eating utensil)
• -s (plural)