Knife

A knife (plural: knives; from Old Norse knifr 'knife, dirk') is a tool or weapon with a cutting edge or blade, usually attached to a handle or hilt. One of the earliest tools used by humanity, knives appeared at least 2.5 million years ago, as evidenced by the Oldowan tools. Originally made of wood, bone, and stone (such as flint and obsidian), over the centuries, in step with improvements in both metallurgy and manufacturing, knife blades have been made from copper, bronze, iron, steel, ceramic, and titanium. Most modern knives have either fixed or folding blades; blade patterns and styles vary by maker and country of origin.

Quotes

• Then Gilgamesh like a butcher, brave and skilful,
  Between the yoke of the horns and the slaughter-spot [he thrust in] his knife.
  • Gilgamesh slaughters the Bull of Heaven, Epic of Gilgamesh, VI, 145 (tr. Andrew R. George)

• When the hungry curate licks the knife there’s not much for the clerk;
  • George Walter Thornbury, "The Jester’s Sermon", in Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads (1857)

Metaphorical

• Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,
  Shut in upon itself and do no harm
  In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,
  And let us hear no sound of human strife
  After the click of the shutting. ...
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), XXIV

• I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
  To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
  • John Masefield, "Sea-Fever", in Salt-Water Poems and Ballads (1902)