Turner

How to spell turner

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce turner

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does turner mean?

1. nounA craftsman who shapes wood or metal by working it on a lathe.
2. nounA flat-bladed kitchen implement used for lifting and flipping food in a pan.

Turner in a sentence

• The turner shaped each chair leg carefully on his lathe.

• She flipped the pancakes with a metal turner.

• A skilled turner can produce dozens of identical wooden bowls in a day.

• Lift the fried egg out of the pan with a turner so the yolk stays whole.

Where does turner come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word is built from the verb 'turn' plus the agent suffix '-er', which English uses to name a person or tool that performs an action. 'Turn' itself reaches back to the Latin tornare, meaning 'to round off or shape on a lathe', which in turn came from tornus, the name of the lathe tool, borrowed from the Greek tornos, a 'tool for drawing a circle'. Old English absorbed the verb early, reinforced later by Old French torner, and from the medieval period a 'turner' was specifically a craftsman who worked wood or metal on a lathe, an occupation common enough to survive as the surname Turner. The kitchen sense, a flat-bladed implement for turning food in a pan, grew naturally from the same idea of something that turns. Because the spelling is simply the familiar word 'turn' with a plain '-er' ending, it stays phonetic and rarely trips writers up.

How the word is built

• turn (from Latin tornare: to shape on a lathe)
• -er (agent suffix: one who, or thing that, does the action)