Trenchers

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A type of flat dish made of wood or metal used to serve food, especially in formal settings
2. A historical plate or board employed for serving meat or other food items, often used in traditional feasts
3. Objects used for holding cooked dishes, mainly seen in earlier culinary traditions and now rare in modern dining practices

Etymology: "Trenchers" is the plural of "trencher," and the word's most striking feature is that its original job was to be the food itself, or at least the thing it sat on. Medieval diners ate from thick slices of stale bread, and the bread slab was the trencher. The name comes from Middle English "trenchour," borrowed from Anglo-Norman and Old Northern French "trenchoir" (French "tranchoir"), all built on a verb meaning "to cut" or "to carve." A trencher was, in other words, the thing you cut on, and it was only later that the word passed to wooden boards and then plates. The verb behind it, "trenchier," is also the source of the English word "trench," which shares the sense of cutting into the ground. Trencher and trench are therefore related through the same idea of cutting, though the two words took very different paths in English.