kerf.
The act of cutting or carving something; a stroke or slice.
Meaning & usage
The act of cutting or carving something; a stroke or slice.
The groove or slit created by cutting or sawing something; an incision.
The portion or quantity (e.g. of wood, hay, turf, wool, etc.) removed or cut off in a given stroke.
The distance between diverging saw teeth.
The flattened, cut-off end of a branch or tree; a stump or sawn-off cross-section.
Where this word comes from
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.
To cut a piece of wood or other material with several kerfs to allow it to be bent.
Where this word comes from
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.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.