1136. This week, we go full Thanksgiving, talking about the origin of butter knives, forks, and more. You'll love all the tidbits you can share with your family or friends during dinner.
1136. This week, we go full Thanksgiving, talking about the origin of butter knives, forks, and more. You'll love all the tidbits you can share with your family or friends during dinner.
🔗 Share your familect recording via Speakpipe, by calling 833-214-4475 (or via WhatsApp chat.)
🔗 Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
🔗 Subscribe to the newsletter.
🔗 Take our advertising survey.
🔗 Get the edited transcript.
🔗 Get Grammar Girl books.
🔗 Join Grammarpalooza. Get ad-free and bonus episodes at Apple Podcasts or Subtext. Learn more about the difference.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475).
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook. Threads. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon. Bluesky.
It's the time of year for family gatherings, roasted turkey, and setting a beautiful table with all your finest tableware. So today we're going to look at the fascinating and sometimes scandalous histories behind the very implements you'll be using to serve and enjoy your Thanksgiving feast if you're in the U.S. — forks, spoons, knives, ladles, saucers, and chargers. I started out looking at the etymology of these words, but the history was too fun not to share.
by Mignon Fogarty
First, picture this: It's Venice in the year 1004, and a Byzantine princess, who was probably named Maria Argyropoulaina, arrives for her wedding to Giovanni Orseolo, son of the Doge of Venice, carrying a case of golden, two-pronged forks; and at the wedding feast, she ate with one, which absolutely scandalized the Venetian guests because in those days, everyone ate with their hands.
Local clergy condemned her for this shocking display of decadence, with some accounts saying a priest declared that "God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks — his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating."
Just two years later, the plague came to Venice and killed the princess, and Saint Peter Damian eventually proclaimed it was divine punishment for her lavish lifestyle, such as using a fork.
According to Etymoline, the word "fork" came into Old English from a Latin word describing a two-pronged fork for cooking or a pitchfork. And this connection to pitchforks would haunt the fork for centuries because its pronged design made many people think of the devil's infernal tool.
But forks had actually been around for a long time before the Byzantine princess shocked Venice — just not in Europe. The earliest known forks were discovered in China, made from bone during the Bronze Age. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all had large forks, but they used them as cooking utensils for lifting meat from boiling pots, not for eating. The innovation of the Byzantine Empire was likely the personal use of forks at the table, and doing so was common there and in the Middle East by the princess's time.
After the fork made its way to Venice by way of marriage, the fork slowly spread through Italy, where it proved especially useful for eating pasta (those prongs were perfect for gathering slippery noodles). Personal forks were common in Italy by the 1300s, and although there's not rock-hard evidence, one popular story is that Catherine de' Medici brought Italian forks to France when she married Henry II in 1533, introducing them to the French court. It's possible she just popularized the fork instead of actually introducing it, but either way, fork use was again spreading through marriage!
People also initially rejected the fork in England, especially men. For example, in 1611, English traveler Thomas Coryate published accounts of seeing people using forks in Italy, and he was initially ridiculed for promoting this "unmanly Italian affectation." But as they did elsewhere, forks eventually prevailed, and according to National Geographic, by the 1800s, forks were standard in Britain and parts of America.
Unlike the scandalous fork, knives are humanity's oldest eating implements — in fact, they're among humanity's oldest tools, period. Knives date back about 2.5 million years to sharpened stones and flints used as weapons and tools, and by 1000 BC, we had iron knives that were attached to handles and could be honed to be quite sharp.
But here's where the knife gets interesting for table manners: for most of history, everyone had their own personal knife that they kept in a sheath on their belt. These knives had pointed blades for spearing food and were also used as weapons. But there was a manners issue: people would bring their own knife to dinner, use it to stab chunks of meat, and then use that same sharp point to pick their teeth.
Enter Cardinal Richelieu of France, founder of the French Academy and a powerful statesman who served King Louis XIII. An oft-repeated story is that around 1637, Richelieu became irritated by the brutish table manners of his dinner guests, particularly this picking teeth with knives thing. He ordered his household knives to have their blades dulled and their tips rounded off. Because Richelieu was famous (and feared), the practice caught on, and French households copied the idea to be thought of as fashionable and well-mannered.
But it was King Louis XIV who really made the change official. In 1669, he banned pointed knives in his Flemish regions, particularly targeting table knives and weapons carried in public, calling for sharp tips of existing knives to be rounded off. His reasoning was partly to reduce violence (unhappy dinner guests were prone to using their sharp knives for more than just eating) and partly to foster more civilized table manners. This shift to blunt-tipped knives also made forks more popular since knives could no longer be used to spear food.
The word "cutlery" goes back to Latin word culter, which also meant "knife," and is a word you'll still find in the name of a farming tool called a coulter — the blade that cuts the soil ahead of a plow.
So at your Thanksgiving table, when you pick up that rounded butter knife, you're holding the direct descendant of Cardinal Richelieu's innovation and King Louis XIV's later edict that's meant to keep you from picking your teeth — or stabbing someone.
Now, unlike the fork and the knife, the spoon has never caused a moral panic or needed a royal edict to blunt it. The spoon is the most universally accepted and uncontroversial of all eating utensils and has come in really just a vast array of shapes and sizes over human history. According to Etymonline, the word "spoon" comes from Old English spōn, meaning "chip, sliver, shaving, [or] splinter of wood." And this makes sense because the earliest spoons were carved from chips of wood.
The oldest ornamental and religious spoons date to around 1000 BC. Ancient Egyptians made spoons from all kinds of material — wood, flint, ivory, and so on — and the spoons were often super ornate, carved with hieroglyphics and religious symbols. Later, Greeks and Romans made spoons from bronze and silver.
During the Middle Ages in Britain, hosts typically supplied wooden or horn spoons for their guests, but the elite used metal. For example, accounts of King Edward I in 1300 show that he had seven gold and eight silver spoons.
And this brings us to silver spoons and babies. Beginning in Tudor times, wealthy godparents would give silver spoons to their godchildren at christening ceremonies, often apostle spoons, which were silver spoons with the image of one of the twelve apostles on the handle. Wealthy benefactors would give a baby the entire set of twelve, while the less well-off would give four spoons (representing Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) or possibly even just one with the saint whose name the child had been given.
The practice was common enough that it became a metaphor for wealth and privilege, first appearing in English in a translation of Don Quixote in 1719 in the line "every Man was not born with a Silver Spoon in his Mouth." But according to the Word Histories site, the first appearance originally in English is from the Irish novelist, playwright, and poet Oliver Goldsmith in 1762 and reads, "One man is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and another with a wooden ladle."
And speaking of ladles, what would Thanksgiving be without a ladle to serve the gravy? The word "ladle" comes from Old English hlædel, meaning "a thing for drawing up or loading." A ladle is literally a tool for loading liquid from one vessel into another.
The Latin equivalent was trulla, meaning a small ladle or scoop, and the Romans used ladles extensively for serving their elaborate sauces and stews. But the ladle goes back much further — archaeological evidence suggests that people have used ladle-like tools since prehistoric times when they needed to transfer liquids to bowls.
The Getty Museum website says, "In ancient Greece, a ladle was a standard part of any wine set, used to dip out wine from large mixing vessels into cups." And the Birmingham Museum of Art says the soup ladle "was purportedly invented by the French courtier Charles de Sainte-Maure, Duke of Montausier" in the mid-1600s. Before that, people "dipped their individual spoons in a tureen" or even drank soup from a common bowl.
Thankfully, we don't do that anymore, and ladles can get a lot of action at Thanksgiving — ladling gravy over turkey and mashed potatoes, filling hot spiced drinks, and serving turkey soup for days after.
When it's time for dessert and coffee, you might bring out the fancy cups and saucers, and here's something that you might not have thought of but that seems obvious once you hear it — saucers were originally for sauce, not for supporting cups. According to Etymonline, saucer ultimately goes back to the Latin word salsus, meaning "salted."
Now, the connection between sauce and salt makes sense when you understand that "sauce" itself comes from Latin salsa, meaning "things salted, salt food." The Proto-Indo-European root is sal-, meaning "salt." So saucers were quite literally little dishes for salty things — specifically, for holding sauce on the table.
It was only around 1700 that the meaning shifted to "small, round, shallow vessel for supporting a cup and retaining any liquid that might spill": a pretty dramatic change in function — from holding sauce to holding a cup and catching drips.
Finally, we have the charger — another item that goes under another piece of tableware. Chargers are large decorative plates that sit at each place setting under the dinner plates, creating an elegant base for your table. I don't know about you, but holidays are the only time my family uses chargers.
Well, the word "charger" in this context comes from the Norman-French word chargeoir, meaning "a place where things are loaded." The same root gives us words like "charge" (to load up with something like electricity) and "cargo" (something loaded). So a charger plate is something another plate is loaded onto.
The word "charger" dates back to around the 1300s, when they were often made of wood, pewter, or, for the very wealthy, silver or gold. Unlike regular dinner plates, chargers were meant to stay on the table throughout the meal, with other plates placed on top of them, although they are always supposed to be removed before dessert is served.
According to the Fine Art Restoration Company, ceramics craftsmen used chargers to show off their skills. The plates could be quite ornate, and by the 1700s, "no aristocratic [European] home was complete without a display of porcelain tableware with grand chargers as one of the central elements." And they were often made to be displayed or given as gifts rather than used on the table.
By the Victorian era, the use of chargers had waned somewhat, but they've made a strong comeback in modern formal dining.
So there you have it — the fork was once considered so sinful that a princess's death from plague was declared divine punishment for using one, the knife is one of humanity's oldest tools, the spoon started as wood chips, the ladle is literally a "loading tool," the saucer started life holding sauce before it ever supported a cup, and the charger is a "loading plate" that adds elegance to your table or that can be hung on a wall.
So if you're gathering around a Thanksgiving feast this week, ponder your butter knife and the 400 years of civilized dining it represents, and delight your kith and kin with stories of kings and queens, salty sauces, and ancient table manners.
And happy Thanksgiving.
Azzarito, Amy. "'A tool of the devil': The dark history of the humble fork." Fast Company, March 25, 2020. https://www.fastcompany.com/90481445/a-tool-of-the-devil-the-dark-history-of-the-humble-fork. Accessed November 14, 2025.
Bramen, Lisa. "A History of Western Eating Utensils, From the Scandalous Fork to the Incredible Spork." Smithsonian Magazine, July 31, 2009,. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-history-of-western-eating-utensils-from-the-scandalous-fork-to-the-incredible-spork-64593179/. Accessed November 14, 2025.
Burke, Danielle, "Charger plates: the history and restoration of antique tableware." Fine Art Restoration Company, October 30, 2024. https://fineart-restoration.co.uk/news/charger-plates-the-history-and-restoration-of-antique-tableware/. Accessed November 14, 2025.
"Charger." Etymonline, https://www.etymonline.com/word/charger. Accessed November 14, 2025.
de Ferrière le Vayer, Marc, "The Fork." https://www.alimentarium.org/en/story/fork Ailmentarium, November 14, 2025.
"Fork." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork. Accessed November 10, 2025.
"Fork." Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/fork. Accessed November 10, 2025.
"How the simple fork almost tore apart the fabric of society." National Geographic, April 1, 2025, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/dinner-fork-history accessed November 14, 2025.
Jackson, C.J. "The Spoon and Its History." Archaeologia, February 13, 1890, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Archaeologia/4PNXXEh1KVgC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22The+Spoon+and+its+History%22+C.+J.+Jackson+Archaeologia&pg=PA107&printsec=frontcover November 14, 2025.
James, Wayne, "The History of the Table Knife and the Spoon." Manly Manners. September 15, 2015. https://manlymanners.wordpress.com/2015/09/15/the-history-of-the-table-knife-and-the-spoon/. Accessed November 10, 2025.
"Ladle." Birmingham Museum of Art, https://www.artsbma.org/collection/ladle-3/ Accessed November 14, 2025.
"Ladle." Getty, https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/104063 Accessed November 14, 2025.
"Ladle." Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/ladle. Accessed November 10, 2025.
"Ladle." Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/ladle_n. Accessed November 10, 2025.
Lange, Alexandra, "Consider the fork, very carefully." The New Yorker, November 29, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/consider-the-fork-very-carefully November 14, 2025.
Long, Tony, "May 13, 1637: Cardinal Richelieu Makes His Point." Wired, May 13, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/05/0513cardinal-richelieu-invents-table-knife/ November 14, 2025.
"Richelieu, Cardinal." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu. Accessed November 14, 2025.
Rupp, Rebecca, "Forks: From Odd Byzantine Instruments to Modern Utensils." National Geographic, December 18, 2014, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/table-mannersaccessed November 14, 2025.
"Sauce." Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/sauce. Accessed November 10, 2025.
"Saucer." Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/saucer. Accessed November 10, 2025.
"Saucer." Oxford English Dictionary.
"Spoon." Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/spoon. Accessed November 10, 2025.
"Silver Gifts for Christening The Perfect Baby Gift." Edinburgh Silver Blog. April 7, 2023. https://www.edinburghsilver.co/blog/silver-gifts-for-christening/. Accessed November 14, 2025.
"Silver spoon." Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_spoon Accessed November 14, 2025.
"Table knife." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_knife. Accessed November 14, 2025.
"The centuries-old tradition of giving a silver spoon as a Baptism gift." Schiavon. May 24, 2019. https://www.schiavon.it/en/blog/post/the-centuries-old-tradition-of-giving-a-silver-spoon-as-a-baptism-gift. Accessed November 14, 2025.
"Thomas Coryat." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Coryat. Accessed November 14, 2025.
Tréguer, Pascal, "Origin of 'to be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth.'" Word Histories. June 20, 2022. https://wordhistories.net/2017/09/17/born-with-silver-spoon/. Accessed November 14, 2025.
Also, I'm completely out of familect stories, and sitting around the Thanksgiving table is a great time to ask your parents or grandparents where your familects came from. So chat them up, and then send me your stories. The number is 83-321-4-GIRL.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Morgan Christianson in advertising; Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts; Nat Hoopes in marketing; Dan Feierabend in audio; and Rebekah Sebastian in marketing, who says she doesn't like hot beverages and drinks iced lattes year round.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of "The Grammar Daily," a book of daily tips, illustrations, and puzzles. Buy a few copies today for all the language lovers in your life, and cross them off your gift list. That's all. Thanks for listening.