英语词汇tenterhooks的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

tenterhooks. Tenters were frameworks used to stretch woven cloth in the days before modern manufacture (as early as the 15th century) and tenterhooks were the pins or hooks that held the cloth in place. Tenterhooks was later applied to the hooks meat is suspended from in butcher shop windows and it is probably from this use of the word that we get the figurative on tenterhooks, to be in a state of “painful” or anxious suspense, your curiosity “torturously stretched” to its limits. The dreaded rack, an instrument of torture that literally stretched people, was also called the tenter and no doubt reinforced the meaning of the phrase, first recorded in the 17th century. Tenter probably derives from the same Latin word (tentus, “stretched”) as tent, a tent being stretched canvas.

词汇	tenterhooks
词源	tenterhooks. Tenters were frameworks used to stretch woven cloth in the days before modern manufacture (as early as the 15th century) and tenterhooks were the pins or hooks that held the cloth in place. Tenterhooks was later applied to the hooks meat is suspended from in butcher shop windows and it is probably from this use of the word that we get the figurative on tenterhooks, to be in a state of “painful” or anxious suspense, your curiosity “torturously stretched” to its limits. The dreaded rack, an instrument of torture that literally stretched people, was also called the tenter and no doubt reinforced the meaning of the phrase, first recorded in the 17th century. Tenter probably derives from the same Latin word (tentus, “stretched”) as tent, a tent being stretched canvas.
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