trencher

/ˈtɹɛnt͡ʃə(ɹ)/

trencher noun: a plate on which food is served or cut.

Noun

trencher (plural trenchers)

(archaic, historical) A plate on which food is served or cut.
- Mrs Partridge, upon this, immediately fell into a fury, and discharged the trencher on which she was eating, at the head of poor Jenny […]1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, volume (please specify |volume=I to VI), London: A[ndrew] Millar, […], →OCLC
Someone who trenches; especially, one who cuts or digs ditches.
A machine for digging trenches.
- The milling action of the bucket line enables the trencher to cut through difficult materials, such as stone rubble and brick filling, and to leave a good trench with clean side walls.1956 January, “New Permanent Way Equipment on British Railways”, in Railway Magazine, page 57

Forms of trencher

plural	trenchers

Origin of trencher

From Middle English trenchour, from Anglo-Norman trenchour and Old Northern French trencheor (French tranchoir), from trenchier (“to cut, to carve”). See trench (verb).

Words formed from trencher

Phrases with trencher

Words that rhyme with trencher

Questions about trencher

What does trencher mean?: Trencher means a plate on which food is served or cut.
What part of speech is trencher?: Trencher is a noun.
How do you pronounce trencher?: Trencher is pronounced /ˈtɹɛnt͡ʃə(ɹ)/.
What is the plural of trencher?: The plural of trencher is trenchers.

Words near trencher in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: trencher (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

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-trencher.wav.

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