knife

Knife comes from Middle English knyf/knif, from late Old English cnīf, itself from Old Norse knífr or Proto-West Germanic *knīb, tracing back to Proto-Germanic *knībaz, from the verb root *knīpaną meaning 'to pinch,' ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *gneybʰ-.

The word's root sense was 'pinch,' not 'cut'—a curious starting point for a blade. In English it eventually pushed aside two older native words for knife, Middle English sax (from Old English seax) and coutel (borrowed from Old French), becoming the standard term. The verb form ('to knife someone') didn't appear until 1865, and the spelling variant 'knive' shows up as early as 1733.

The Proto-Indo-European root *gneybʰ- also gave Lithuanian gnýbti and žnýbti, both meaning 'to pinch,' and gnaibis, 'pinching'—so knife shares a distant family tie with words describing a pinch rather than a blade.