Where does the phrase on tender hooks come from?

Really uncomfortable. Luckily the expression is figurative, or people would be walking around with a lot of little holes in them.





A tenter is a frame on which cloth is stretched during manufacture, so that it may dry evenly. The frame is outfitted with sharp hooks or bent nails that hold the cloth stretched. These hooks, you will not be surprised to learn, are called tenterhooks.





Cloth-stretching being outside of most people's range of experience these days, tenterhook is rarely found except in the figurative expression on tenterhooks, meaning 'in a state of uneasy suspense or painful anxiety'.





Tenterhooks is used in similar figurative expressions from the sixteenth century onwards: Sir Thomas More and Byron both used the word meaning 'something that causes painful anxiety', and the fuller expression to stretch on tenterhooks 'to strain beyond a normal limit' was in use until the nineteenth century. The bare form on tenterhooks itself is first recorded in the mid-eighteenth century, in Smollett: "I left him upon the tenterhooks of impatient uncertainty" (Roderick Random).

Where does the phrase on tender hooks come from?
The phrase you are thinking of is actually "on tenter hooks". A tenter hook is used for hanging flesh/meat. This same hook was often used in medieval times as a means of torture. A person was put on tenter hooks and left there to hang.
Reply:It's 'tenter', love.





Relax, you haven't made a 'wally' of yourself. Anyway we're just a bunch of strangers. Have a good one!
Reply:a "tenterhook" is a hook used to fasten cloth on a tenter.


A tenter is a framework on which fabric can be held taut for drying or other treatment.
Reply:Don't you mean "tenter" hooks? Not tender, because that word means something else entirely.





In answer to your question;





In the process of clothmaking called "fulling", fuller's earth was used; this is a soft earthy material occurring in nature. The cloth might also be washed. After washing, to prevent shrinkage and wrinkling, the cloth would be stretched on great frames known as tenters and held onto those frames by tenterhooks. It is from this process that we derive the phrase being on tenterhooks as meaning to be held in suspense.
Reply:real soft tackle box
Reply:Non-shrink fabrics made tenters pretty much obsolete years ago but the word persists in the compound "tenterhooks," itself rarely used outside the phrase "to be on tenterhooks" (as opposed to tender hooks, which hold nothing). You may use this noun as a verb: to tenter material is to stretch it out on a frame.





Today's word comes Latin tentorium "shelter made of stretched skins," from tendere "to stretch," also the origin of "tent." The original Proto-Indo-European root was *ten- "to stretch" and it came to English through its proto-Germanic ancestors as "thin," the state animal products reach when stretched. The Latin word, "tendere," also gave us "tender," "extend," and other words originally implying a stretch. "Tetanus" comes from the Greek variant in tetanus "stiff, rigid," another state arrived at by stretching. The same root turns up twice in Sanskrit, both as tasaram "shuttle" and tantram "loom," where shuttles are used. In Persian the [n] was lost to produce tar "string," which underlies Hindi "sitar." (We hurried today's word out since Kathleen Lamantia was on tenterhooks to find out what this word is all about.)
Reply:It's tenter hooks actually.





It comes from one of the processes of making woollen cloth. After it had been woven, the cloth still contained oil from the fleece, mixed with dirt. It was cleaned in a fulling mill, but then it had to be dried carefully or it would shrink and crease. So the lengths of wet cloth were stretched on wooden frames, and left out in the open for some time. This allowed them to dry and straightened their weave. These frames were the tenters, and the tenter hooks were the metal hooks used to fix the cloth to the frame. At one time, it would have been common in manufacturing areas to see fields full of these frames (older English maps sometimes marked an area as a tenter-field). So it was not a huge leap of the imagination to think of somebody on tenterhooks as being in an state of anxious suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter. The tenters have gone, but the meaning has survived.



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