The cliché: ‘on tenterhooks’
“She is with the doctor now, getting the results of her tests and we are all waiting on tenterhooks to find out whether she has the all clear.”
We all know what this means – we say it when we are waiting, in an uncomfortable state of suspense, for something to happen. But why do we say it and how did it come to have this meaning?
Firstly, it must be said that the expression is NOT ‘tender’ hooks, though this is a common mispronunciation. And it has nothing to do with tent pegs or camping either!
The cliché’s history
The phrase ‘on tenterhooks’ refers to a cloth manufacturing practice that goes back as early as the 14th century and persisted even as late as the early 20th century. In order to prevent shrinkage and maintain the shape of wet woollen and linen cloth as it dried, it would be stretched taut over an outdoor wooden frame called a tenter and fastened in place by hooks.
Interestingly, the tenters were frequently erected in the form of a line of fencing in fields surrounding woollen mills and these were referred to as ‘tenterfields’.
It is easy to see how the figurative expression ‘on tenterhooks’, with its meaning of painful tension, derived from the ‘tenting’ or stretching of fabric.
By the mid-18th century, the phrase “on tenterhooks” came to mean being in a state of tension, uneasiness, anxiety, or suspense, i.e. figuratively stretched like the cloth on the tenter!
