Tablespoon

How to spell tablespoon

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce tablespoon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tablespoon mean?

1. nounA large spoon used for serving food, or the standard cooking measure it represents (roughly 15 millilitres).

Tablespoon in a sentence

• The recipe calls for one tablespoon of olive oil.

• She stirred the sauce with a wooden tablespoon.

Where does tablespoon come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining 'table' and 'spoon'. The first element 'table' came into Old English as 'tabule' from the Latin 'tabula', meaning a flat board or plank, later reinforced by the Old French 'table'; it came to mean the flat-topped piece of furniture at which people eat. The second element 'spoon' descends from the Old English 'spon', which originally meant a chip or splinter of wood, since the earliest spoons were carved shavings; the same Germanic root survives in related words for wood shavings in other Northern European languages. By the early 1700s the two parts were yoked together to name the larger serving spoon kept on the table, as opposed to the smaller teaspoon, and the word later became a fixed unit of cooking measurement. Because both halves are common everyday words spelled exactly as they sound, the compound holds no real spelling surprise beyond remembering it is written as one solid word.

How the word is built

• table (a flat-topped piece of furniture)
• spoon (an eating or serving utensil)