spoon
pronunciation
How to pronounce spoon in British English:
UK [spuːn]
How to pronounce spoon in American English:
US [spuːn]
-
- Noun:
- a piece of cutlery with a shallow bowl-shaped container and a handle; used to stir or serve or take up food
- as much as a spoon will hold
- formerly a golfing wood with an elevated face
-
- Verb:
- scoop up or take up with a spoon
- snuggle and lie in a position where one person faces the back of the others
Word Origin
- spoon
- spoon: [OE] The word spoon originally denoted ‘chip of wood’. Such chips typically being slightly concave, they could be used for conveying liquid, and by the 14th century spoon, through Scandinavian influence, was being used in its present-day sense. It goes back ultimately to the same prehistoric base as produced English spade, and its Old Norse relative spánn ‘chip’ lies behind the span of spick and span. The late 19th-century slang use ‘court, make love, bill and coo’ comes from a late 18th-century application of the noun to a ‘shallow’ or foolish person.=> spade
- spoon (n.)
- Old English spon "chip, sliver, shaving, splinter of wood," from Proto-Germanic *spe-nu- (cognates: Old Norse spann, sponn "chip, splinter," Swedish spån "a wooden spoon," Old Frisian spon, Middle Dutch spaen, Dutch spaan, Old High German span, German Span "chip, splinter"), from PIE *spe- (2) "long, flat piece of wood" (cognates: Greek spathe "spade," also possibly Greek sphen "wedge"). As the word for a type of eating utensil, c. 1300 in English (in Old English such a thing might be a metesticca), in this sense supposed to be from Old Norse sponn, which meant "spoon" as well as "chip, tile." The "eating utensil" sense is specific to Middle English and Scandinavian, though Middle Low German spon also meant "wooden spatula." To be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth is from at least 1719 (Goldsmith, 1765, has: "one man is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and another with a wooden ladle").
- spoon (v.)
- 1715, "to dish out with a spoon," from spoon (n.). The meaning "court, flirt sentimentally" is first recorded 1831, a back-formation from spoony (adj.) "soft, silly, weak-minded, foolishly sentimental." Related: Spooned; spooning.
Example
- 1. If you use a teaspoon , it should be a measuring spoon .
- 2. Spray carpet cleaner on the stain and scrub it into the carpet with a spoon .
- 3. Another tried by herself to insert a boiled elm twig , followed by a spoon handle .
- 4. He came into the room eating breakfast cereal from a paper bowl with a plastic spoon .
- 5. Here to jiggle for you , to be cut with a spoon , and to silently weep .