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''fork'' ⚬ Entries

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''fork'' ⚬｜Definition｜1st｜20261013192254-00-⌔

fork - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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A fork (etymology 1, noun sense 1.1) used a pronged eating utensil.

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A small garden fork (etymology 1, noun sense 1.2)

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The white knight simultaneously attacks the black king and rook with a fork (etymology 1, noun sense 7).

Noun

fork (plural forks)

  • Any of several types of pronged (tined) tools (physical tools), as follows:
    • A utensil with spikes used to put solid food into the mouth, or to hold food down while cutting, or for serving food.
      • ✤ Coordinate terms: spoon, knife, table knife, butter knife, steak knife, spork, foon, chork
      • ✤ Hyponyms: salad fork, cocktail fork, crab fork, pickle fork, chip fork
    • Any of several types of pronged tools for use on farms, in fields, or in the garden or lawn, such as a smaller hand fork for weeding or a larger one for turning over the soil.
      • Such a pronged tool having a long straight handle, generally for two-handed use, as used for digging, lifting, mucking, pitching, etc.
        • ✤ Hyponyms: pitchfork, digging fork, spade fork, spading fork, garden fork
    • A tuning fork.
  • (by abstraction, from the tool shape) A fork in the road, as follows:
    • (physical) An intersection in a road or path where one road is split into two.
    • (figurative) A decision point.
  • (by abstraction, from the tool shape) A point where a waterway, such as a river or other stream, splits and flows into two (or more) different directions.
    • ✤ Antonym: confluence
  • (metonymic, analogous to any prong of a pronged tool) One of the parts into which anything is furcated or divided; a prong; a branch of a stream, a road, etc.; a barbed point, as of an arrow.
    • ✤ Synonyms: branch, prong (but the word prong is usually reserved for the physical sense, and the word tine is always so)
    • ✤ *a thunderbolt with three forks *
    • ✤ this fork of the river dries up during droughts
  • (figuratively, decision-making) A point in time where one has to make a decision between two life paths.
    • (metonymic) Either of the (figurative) paths thus taken.
  • (figuratively, by abstraction, from a physical fork) (software development, content management, data management) A departure from having a single source of truth (SSOT), sometimes intentionally but usually unintentionally.
    • (metonymic) Any of the pieces/versions (of software, content, or data sets) thus created.
      • ✤ Antonym: single source of truth, SSOT
    • (software) The launch of one or more separate software development efforts based upon a modified copy of an existing project, especially in free and open-source software.
      • (software) Any of the software projects resulting from the launch of such separate software development efforts based upon a copy of the original project.
        • ✤ LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice.
    • (content management) The splitting of the coverage of a topic (within a corpus of content) into two or more pieces.
      • ✤ A content fork may be intentional (as from a schism about goals) or unintentional (merely from a lack of reorganizing, so far).
      • (content management) Any of the pieces/versions of content thus created.
  • (chess) The simultaneous attack of two adversary pieces with one single attacking piece (especially a knight).
  • (UK, vulgar) The crotch.
  • (colloquial) A forklift.
    • ✤ Are you qualified to drive a fork?
  • Either of the blades of a forklift (or, in plural, the set of blades), on which the goods to be raised are loaded.
    • ✤ Get those forks tilted back more or you’re gonna lose that pallet!
  • (cycling, motorcycling, by abstraction from a pronged tool’s shape) In a bicycle or motorcycle, the portion of the frameset holding the front wheel, allowing the rider to steer and balance, also called front fork.
    • ✤ The fork can be equipped with a suspension on mountain bikes.
  • The upper front brow of a saddle bow, connected in the tree by the two saddle bars to the cantle on the other end.
    • ✤ Synonyms: swell, pommel
  • (computing, file systems) A set of data associated with an individual file in some file systems.
    • ✤ *resource fork *
    • ✤ HFS+ uses forks to store file data. Generally there are two types of forks available in HFS+, the data fork and the resource fork.1
  • (obsolete) A gallows.
    • ✤ *They had run through all punishments, and just ‘scaped the fork *2

Verb

fork (third-person singular simple present forks, present participle forking, simple past and past participle forked)

  • (ambitransitive) To divide into two or more branches or copies.
    • ✤ A road, a tree, or a stream forks.
    • (ambitransitive, computing) To spawn a new child process by duplicating the existing process.
      • ✤ A parent process forks a child process, which in turn can fork other processes.3
      • ✤ It appears that the shell forks a copy of itself and that this copy then forks to make each of the previous processes in the pipeline.4
    • (ambitransitive, software engineering) To launch a separate software development effort based upon a modified copy of an existing software project, especially in free and open-source software.
      • ✤ For various reasons, McCool’s server project subsequently forked, leading to the development of the Apache Web Server.5
      • ✤ Google forked WebKit to create the Blink project in April 2013 because they wanted to make larger-scale changes to WebKit to fit their own needs that did not align well with the WebKit project itself.6
    • (transitive, software engineering) To create a copy of a distributed version control repository.
      • ✤ In this model, anyone can fork an existing repository and push changes to their personal fork.7
  • (transitive) To move with a fork (as hay or food).
    • ✤ * forking the sheaves on the high-laden cart*8
    • ✤ Brianna curbed her pang of envy as she forked her plain, low-fat, crouton-free salad niçoise into her mouth and shook her head.9
  • (transitive) To apply a fork to.
    • ✤ * forking the soil*
    • ✤ They delight in combing, or rather forking it, using for that purpose a large wooden fork with four diverging prongs, which answers the purpose of separating and arranging the long tangled, frizzly mass of cranial vegetation much better than any comb could do.10
  • (transitive, UK) To kick someone in the crotch.
  • (intransitive) To shoot into blades, as corn does.
    • ✤ I have known them couched up a Yard thick cover’d with an Hair-cloth and ſtirred only once a day, the Maltſer being always careful to throw the frozen outſides into the middle till the Corn begin to fork and warm in the Couch; after which time if it be not laid too thin, it will not eaſily freeze.11
  • (chess) To simultaneously attack two opposing pieces with a single attacking piece.
  • (transitive) Euphemistic form of fuck.
    • ✤ They were forking each other in the back room.

Noun

fork (plural forks)

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  • (mining) The bottom of a sump into which the water of a mine drains.

Verb

fork (third-person singular simple present forks, present participle forking, simple past and past participle forked)

  • (mining, transitive) To bale a shaft dry.
    • ✤ * Forking the water, is drawing it all out; and when it is done, they say, “the mine or the water is forked;” and “the engine is in fork.”*12

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /fɔːk/

📊 ➺

  • (General American) IPA: /fɔɹk/, [fo̞ɹk]
  • Audio (General American): 🔊
  • (without the horse–hoarse merger, rhotic) IPA: /fo(ː)ɹk/
  • Rhymes: -ɔː(ɹ)k

Etymology 1

From Middle English forke (“digging fork”), from Old English force, forca (“forked instrument used to torture”), from Proto-West Germanic ﹡furkō (“fork”), from Latin furca (“pitchfork, forked stake; gallows, beam, stake, support post, yoke”), of uncertain origin. The Middle English word was later reinforced by Anglo-Norman, Old Northern French forque (= Old French forche whence French fourche), also from the Latin. Doublet of fourche and furcate. Cognate also with North Frisian forck (“fork”), Dutch vork (“fork”), Danish fork (“fork”), German Forke (“pitchfork”). Displaced native gafol, ġeafel, ġeafle (“fork”), from Old English.

In its primary sense of “fork”, Latin furca appears to be derived from Proto-Indo-European ﹡ǵʰerk(ʷ)-, ﹡ǵʰerg(ʷ)- (“fork”), although the development of the -c- is difficult to explain. In other senses this derivation is unlikely. For these, perhaps it is connected to Proto-Germanic ﹡furkaz, ﹡firkalaz (“stake, stick, pole, post”), from Proto-Indo-European ﹡perg- (“pole, post”). If so, this would relate the word to Old English forclas pl (“bolt”), Old Saxon ferkal (“lock, bolt, bar”), Old Norse forkr (“pole, staff, stick”), Norwegian fork (“stick, bat”), Swedish fork (“pole”).

Etymology 2

Ultimately from Etymology 1, above, through use for various things with two or more branches. Attested in this sense from the 18th century.13

Printed 2026-10-14.

(echo:: @ ᯤ)

Footnotes

  1. 2025, Fergus Toolan, File System Forensics, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 357: ↩

  2. a. 1680, Samuel Butler, Characters: ↩

  3. 2008, Mark G. Sobell, A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux ‎, Pearson Education, →ISBN: ↩

  4. 2013, W. Richard Stevens, Stephen A. Rago, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, 3rd edition, Addison-Wesley, →ISBN, page 304: ↩

  5. 2007, Fadi P. Deek, James A. M. McHugh, Open Source: Technology and Policy, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 21: ↩

  6. 2015, Christian Bird et al., editors, The Art and Science of Analyzing Software Data, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 77: ↩

  7. 2015, Sajal Debnath, Mastering PowerCLI, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 27: ↩

  8. 1844, John Wilson, Essay on the Genius, and Character of Burns: ↩

  9. 2018, Maya Blake, chapter 2, in What the Greek’s Money Can’t Buy (Greek Bachelors), HarperCollins UK, →ISBN: ↩

  10. 1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 254: ↩

  11. 1707, J[ohn] Mortimer, The Whole Art of Husbandry; or, The Way of Managing and Improving of Land. […], London: […] J[ohn] H[umphreys] for H[enry] Mortlock […], and J[onathan] Robinson […], →OCLC: ↩

  12. 1836 [1808], Richard Polwhele, A Cornish English Vocabulary: ↩

  13. “fork (n.) sense II.11” under “fork, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, June 2024. ↩

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