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Tenterhooks ortenter hooks arehookednails used with a device known as atenter, a wooden frame, used since at least the 14th century in the process of makingwoolencloth, over which wet cloth would be stretched to prevent shrinkage as it dries, but now superseded by thestenter in the textile manufacturing industry.
The phrase "on tenterhooks" has become ametaphor for nervous anticipation.
After a piece of cloth was woven, it still containedoil and dirt from thefleece; acraftsmen known as afuller (in Scotland,Scots:tucker, waulker), cleaned the woollen cloth in afulling mill, and thereafter dry it without allowing the fabric to shrink. To this end, the fuller stretches the wet cloth over a large wooden frame, called atenter (from Latin tendere 'to stretch'), leaving it to dry outdoors. The lengths of wet cloth were stretched on the tenter usingtenterhooks, hooked nails made with a long shank that was driven into the wooden tenter frame around its perimeter, on which theselvedges were fixed so that the cloth would retain its shape and size as it dried.[1]
Historically,tentergrounds (alternatively,tenter-fields), large open spaces full of tenters, wherever cloth was made, and as a result the word "tenter" is found in place names throughout the United Kingdom and its former colonial possessions, for example several streets inSpitalfields,London,[2] andTenterfield House inHaddington, East Lothian, Scotland, which in turn gave its name toTenterfield in New South Wales, Australia.[3]
The wordtenter is still used today to refer to production line machinery employed to stretchpolyester films and similar fabrics.[citation needed] The spellingstenter is also found.
By the mid-18th century, the phraseon tenterhooks came to mean being in a state of tension, uneasiness,anxiety, or suspense, i.e., figuratively stretched like the cloth on the tenter.[4]
John Ford's 1633 playBroken Heart contains the lines: "There is no faith in woman. Passion, O, be contain'd! My very heart-strings Are on the tenters."[5]
In 1690 the periodicalThe General History of Europe used the term in the modern sense: "The mischief is, they will not meet again these two years, so that all business must hang upon the tenterhooks till then."[6]
In 1826, English periodicalMonthly magazine or British register of literature, sciences, and the belles-lettres contained the line "I hope (though the wish is a cruel one) that my fair readers, if any such readers have deigned to follow me thus far, are on tenterhooks to know to whom the prize was adjudged."[7][8] In a letter to his wife the same year, American educatorFrancis Wayland (waiting for his promised appointment as President ofBrown University) wrote "I was never so much on tenter hooks before."[9]
The misuse of "on tender hooks" instead of "on tenterhooks" is one of the most misused English phrases, oreggcorns, according to a 2017 survey of two thousand British adults, ranking in fifth place.[10]
