Word.ws English Dictionary

fork

/fɔːk//fɔɹk/

fork noun: a utensil with spikes used to put solid food into the mouth, or to hold food down while cutting, or for serving food. Also the euphemistic form of fuck.

fork: a utensil with spikes used to put solid food into the mouth, or to hold food down while cutting, or...
Image: CC BY-SA 3.0 us, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

fork (plural forks)

  1. A utensil with spikes used to put solid food into the mouth, or to hold food down while cutting, or for serving food.
  2. 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.
  3. Such a pronged tool having a long straight handle, generally for two-handed use, as used for digging, lifting, mucking, pitching, etc.
  4. A tuning fork.
  5. (physical, by abstraction) An intersection in a road or path where one road is split into two.
  6. (figuratively, by abstraction) A decision point.
  7. (by abstraction) A point where a waterway, such as a river or other stream, splits and flows into two (or more) different directions.
    Antonyms:
    confluence
  8. (metonymically, 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.
    • a thunderbolt with three forks
    • this fork of the river dries up during droughts
    Synonyms:
    branch, prong
  9. (figuratively, decision-making) A point in time where one has to make a decision between two life paths.
    1. (figuratively, metonymically, decision-making) Either of the (figurative) paths thus taken.
  10. (figuratively, metonymically, by abstraction) Any of the pieces/versions (of software, content, or data sets) thus created.
    Antonyms:
    single source of truth, SSOT
  11. (figuratively, by abstraction) 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.
  12. (figuratively, by abstraction) 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.
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  1. (figuratively, by abstraction, 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).
  2. (figuratively, by abstraction, content management) Any of the pieces/versions of content thus created.
  3. (figuratively, by abstraction) A split in a blockchain resulting from protocol disagreements, or a branch of the blockchain resulting from such a split.
    • Known as a “fork”, the new version of bitcoin (dubbed Bitcoin XT) would support more transactions per hour, at the cost of increasing the amount of memory required to hold a full database of all the bitcoin transactions throughout history, known as the blockchain.2015 August 17, Alex Hern, “Bitcoin's forked: chief scientist launches alternative proposal for the currency”, in The Guardian
  4. The simultaneous attack of two adversary pieces with one single attacking piece (especially a knight).
  5. (UK, vulgar) The crotch.
  6. (colloquial) A forklift.
    • Are you qualified to drive a fork?
  7. 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!
  8. (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.
  9. 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
  10. (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.2025, Fergus Toolan, File System Forensics, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 357
  11. (obsolete) A gallows.
    • They had run through all punishments, and just 'scaped the forka. 1680, Samuel Butler, Characters

Verb (1)

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

  1. (ambitransitive) To divide into two or more branches or copies.
    • A road, a tree, or a stream forks.
    1. (ambitransitive) 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.2008, Mark G. Sobell, A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Pearson Education, →ISBN
      • 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.2013, W. Richard Stevens, Stephen A. Rago, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, 3rd edition, Addison-Wesley, →ISBN, page 304
    2. (ambitransitive) 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.2007, Fadi P. Deek, James A. M. McHugh, Open Source: Technology and Policy, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 21
      • 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.2015, Christian Bird et al., editors, The Art and Science of Analyzing Software Data, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 77
    3. (ambitransitive, transitive) 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.2015, Sajal Debnath, Mastering PowerCLI, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 27
  2. (transitive) To move with a fork (as hay or food).
    • forking the sheaves on the high-laden cart1844, John Wilson, Essay on the Genius, and Character of Burns
    • Brianna curbed her pang of envy as she forked her plain, low-fat, crouton-free salad niçoise into her mouth and shook her head.2018, Maya Blake, chapter 2, in What the Greek's Money Can't Buy (Greek Bachelors), HarperCollins UK, →ISBN
  3. (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.1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 254
  4. (UK, transitive) To kick someone in the crotch.
  5. (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.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
  6. To simultaneously attack two opposing pieces with a single attacking piece.

Noun (2)

fork (plural forks)

  1. The bottom of a sump into which the water of a mine drains.

Verb (2)

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

  1. (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.”1836 [1808], Richard Polwhele, A Cornish English Vocabulary

Also used as

fork is also the euphemistic form of fuck.

fork meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

fork in Hindi

eating utensil
काँटा m or कांटा kā̃ṭā

fork in Tamil

eating utensil
போர்க் pōrk

fork in Marathi

computer science: splitting of a process
फोर्क phorka
computer science: copying and separately developing a project
फोर्क phorka
computer science: a separately developed project based upon a copy of an existing project
फोर्क phorka
eating utensil
काटा kāṭā

fork in Urdu

eating utensil
کانْٹا kānṭā
More languagesFewer languages
fork in Bengali
কাঁটাচামচ kãṭacamoc
fork in Telugu
ఫోర్క్ phōrk
fork in Malayalam
ഫോർക്ക് phōṟkkŭ
fork in Kannada
ಫೋರ್ಕ್ phōrk
fork in Punjabi
ਕਾਂਟਾ kāṇṭā, کَانْٹا kānṭā
fork in Gujarati
કાંટો kā̃ṭo
fork in Odia
କଣ୍ଟା kaṇṭā
fork in Sinhala
ගෑරප්පුව gǣrappuwa
fork in Assamese
কাঁটাচামুচ kãtasamus, কাঁইটীয়া চামুচ kãitia samus
fork in Nepali
काँटा kā̃ṭā
fork in Pashto
پنجه panjá
fork in Tagalog
tinidor
fork in Arabic
شَوْكَة šawka, مِذْرَاة miḏrāh, شوكة šōka, فرشيطة furšīṭa
fork in Malay
garpu, cukit, porok
fork in Indonesian
garpu
fork in Persian
چَنْگَال čangāl, چَنْگال čangâl, پَنْجَه panja
fork in Thai
ส้อม sɔ̂m
fork in Vietnamese
dĩa, nĩa, xiên, càng
fork in Myanmar
ခရင်း hka.rang:, ခက်ရင်း hkak-rang:
Dhivehi
އޫ ū

Examples of fork in a sentence

  • A spork is a kind of fork that doubles as a spoon.
  • Collect a knife and fork from the cutlery station on the way to your table.
  • He took a blind guess at which fork in the road would take him to the airport.

All 40 example sentences with fork

Synonyms of fork

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of fork

Forms of fork

Noun
pluralforks
alternative formforcque
Verb
third-person singular presentforks
present participleforking
past participleforked
pastforked

Past tense of fork: forked

Plural of fork: forks

Origin of fork

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”)...

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

Words formed from fork

Phrases with fork

50 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with fork

10 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about fork

What does fork mean?
Fork means a utensil with spikes used to put solid food into the mouth, or to hold food down while cutting, or for serving food.
What is fork in Hindi?
Fork in Hindi is काँटा m or कांटा (kā̃ṭā). See Fork meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is fork?
Fork can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce fork?
Fork is pronounced /fɔːk/ (UK).
What is the plural of fork?
The plural of fork is forks.

Words near fork in the dictionary

  1. forisomes
  2. forjudge
  3. forjudged
  4. forjudges
  5. forjudging
  6. fork
  7. fork beam
  8. fork beams
  9. fork bomb
  10. fork bombs
  11. fork buffet

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fork (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-uk-a fork.ogg, En-us-fork.ogg.

Cite this entry: “fork.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fork. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.