storyknife

storyknife noun: a carved knife made for a Yup'ik girl to use for storyknifing.

Noun

storyknife (plural storyknives)

A carved knife made for a Yup'ik girl to use for storyknifing.
- Pretty Girt Students sell a packet containing a hand-carved storyknife, examples of stories, and illustrations. Villagers tell stories and illustrate them with drawings carved in the snow, mud, or sand.1985, Judith Kleinfeld, Alaska's Small Rural High Schools: Are They Working?, page 111
- This is confirmed by Molly, a ten-year-old cousin, who comes into the kitchen waving her storyknife at us.1994, Jaipaul L. Roopnarine, James Ewald Johnson, Frank H. Hooper, Children's Play in Diverse Cultures, →ISBN, page 188

Back when we used the storyknife all the time, qulirat [traditional tales] were readily available.2005, Ann Fienup-Riordan, Wise Words of the Yup'ik People: We Talk to You Because We Love You, →ISBN:
A Yup'ik Eskimo storyknife was usually made from wood, bone, or ivory by a father, uncle, or grandfather for a young girl in the family.2013, Carolyn Kremers, Upriver, →ISBN, page xii:

plural	storyknives

From story + knife.

What does storyknife mean?: Storyknife means a carved knife made for a Yup'ik girl to use for storyknifing.
How do you use storyknife in a sentence?: Back when we used the storyknife all the time, qulirat [traditional tales] were readily available.
What part of speech is storyknife?: Storyknife is a noun.
What is the plural of storyknife?: The plural of storyknife is storyknives.

Adapted from Wiktionary: storyknife (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: 2026-09-02

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