This is what a tenterhook looks like: from an 1822 trade catalogue published by H. Barns & Sons, of Birmingham, England
You know what it means – to be on tenterhooks (not ‘tenderhooks’ as I’ve heard lots of people say) is to be nervously excited about something that’s going to happen in the future, like your Amazon delivery or the new series of Ozark. But do you know what a tenterhook actually is? If the answer’s yes, then you’re obviously far too clever to be reading this, and should go away. Thanks.
For those of us who are still here, a tenterhook is a sharp hook that fastens cloth to, you’ve guessed it, a tenter. And a tenter is a frame that people making cloth, usually woollen, stretch it on (like a tent, geddit?), to stop it shrinking while it dries. Obviously this means the cloth is very tense, which is where the phrase comes from. Back in the day (I’m not sure which day, but let’s gloss over that), it would have been common to see fields full of tenters, which is probably why the phrase made its way into the vernacular. It’s interesting (to me, at least) that while tenterhooks themselves have pretty much disappeared, we’ve kept the phrase, despite not knowing what it’s referring to. Oh, and the word ‘tenter’ comes from from a Latin word, tendere, which means ‘to stretch’.
Thanks to my pal Rob Frankson for recommending I investigate this one.