Word.ws English Dictionary

kerf

/kɜː(ɹ)f/

kerf noun: the act of cutting or carving something; a stroke or slice.

kerf: the act of cutting or carving something; a stroke or slice
Image: Roberto Verzo, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

kerf (plural kerfs)

  1. (archaic) The act of cutting or carving something; a stroke or slice.
  2. The groove or slit created by cutting or sawing something; an incision.
    • They pass through a cleft that has been made across a low range of hills, like a kerf in the top of a log, and enter into a lovely territory of subtly swelling emerald green fields strewn randomly with small white capsules that he takes to be sheep.1999, Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
  3. The portion or quantity (e.g. of wood, hay, turf, wool, etc.) removed or cut off in a given stroke.
    • Sawing with a thin-kerf blade produces a kerf that's 1/2 to 1/3 the size of a standard blade kerf.1991, Popular Mechanics, January issue, page 63, "Thin-kerf blades", by Rosario Capotostro
  4. The distance between diverging saw teeth.
    • Sawing with a thin-kerf blade produces a kerf that's 1/2 to 1/3 the size of a standard blade kerf.1991, Popular Mechanics, January issue, page 63, "Thin-kerf blades", by Rosario Capotostro
  5. The flattened, cut-off end of a branch or tree; a stump or sawn-off cross-section.
    • Sebastian, still not alone, is seated on the white-and-cinder-grey trunk of a felled tree. […] A Camberwell Beauty skims past and settles on the kerf, fanning its velvety wings.1941, Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Penguin 1971 edition, page 115

Verb

kerf (third-person singular simple present kerfs, present participle kerfing, simple past and past participle kerfed)

  1. To cut a piece of wood or other material with several kerfs to allow it to be bent.

kerf meaning in Tamil and Urdu

kerf in Tamil

அரிவகலம், வெட்டு

kerf in Urdu

چاک, چیر, شگاف

Forms of kerf

Noun
pluralkerfs
Verb
third-person singular presentkerfs
present participlekerfing
past participlekerfed
pastkerfed

Origin of kerf

From Middle English kerf, kirf, kyrf, from Old English cyrf (“an act of cutting, a cutting off; a cutting instrument”), from Proto-West Germanic *kurbi, from Proto-Germanic *kurbiz (“a cut; notch; clipping”), from Proto-Indo-European *gerbʰ- (“to scratch”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Käärf, West Frisian kerf, Swedish korv. Related also to Dutch kerf, German Low German Karve, Karv, German Kerbe.

Words formed from kerf

  • kerf allowance
  • kerf graft

Words that rhyme with kerf

3 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about kerf

What does kerf mean?
Kerf means the act of cutting or carving something; a stroke or slice.
What is kerf in Tamil?
Kerf in Tamil is அரிவகலம், வெட்டு. See Kerf meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is kerf?
Kerf can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce kerf?
Kerf is pronounced /kɜː(ɹ)f/.
What is the plural of kerf?
The plural of kerf is kerfs.

Words near kerf in the dictionary

  1. Kerethite
  2. Kerethites
  3. Kerewa
  4. Kerewo
  5. Kerewong
  6. kerf
  7. kerfed
  8. kerfing
  9. kerfings
  10. kerflap
  11. kerflewie

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kerf (page history and authors); kerf (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); kerf (Urdu Wiktionary) (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-us-kerf.ogg.

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