A Conversation for Spoons
"Spoon"
Inkwash Started conversation Nov 16, 2000
On this whole subject of spoons, where on earth does the word spoon come from? It's undoubtedly one of my favourite words in English (so smooth, so spontaneous!), but who gave birth to it?
To my knowledge the main influences on the English languages are Latin, French, and the Celtic, Germanic and Scandinavian languages. French gives us "Cuillère" or something similar, and I assume the Latin word is not far off. Swedish is "Sked" and the German word also sounds nothing like it. If anyone has any idea what it is in Welsh, Irish etc then it might help enlighten us all.
"Spoon"
Kari Posted Apr 11, 2001
Spoon is Old English and related to Old High German and seems to derive from "splinter" or "sliver". presumably they took a sliver of wood and scooped food up with it
"Spoon"
Inkwash Posted Nov 4, 2002
Found it.
After all this time, I've finally found that the word comes from a Norse word "Spön", meaning 'chip of wood'.
"Spoon"
NightCrawler Posted Nov 21, 2002
The Danish word is very close to the Swedish, but we call it "ske".
Key: Complain about this post
"Spoon"
More Conversations for Spoons
Write an Entry
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."