Chopsticks, each of a pair of small, thin, tapered sticks of wood, ivory, or plastic, held together in one hand and used as eating utensils especially by the Chinese and the Japanese.
At BestChopsticks.com we’ve been around chopsticks for a very long time. And although we see chopsticks spelled in many a creative way – such as chop sticks or chopstix – chopsticks is generally spelled “chopsticks.” The origins of the English word chopsticks is believed to come from Chinese Pidgin English from chop chop meaning “quickly.” The earliest known written English use of the word appears in William Dampier’s 1699 book Voyages and Descriptions though the Italian traveler Ricci Matteo in his book Notes on China about 100 years earlier was one of the first to describe chopsticks to Europeans.
In China chopsticks have been called by many names. Over 2,000 years ago during the Qin Dynasty they were called jia. Later in the Han Dynasty they were called zhu and their character was a combination of the radicals “bamboo” and “assistance.” Later zhu became a combination of “bamboo” and “cook.” During the Ming Dynasty the word zhu took on a taboo as it also meant “stop” and “shipworm” so the name changed to what is now kuaizi (筷) meaning “quick bamboo.”
In Japan chopsticks are called hashi (はし). When the accent is on the HA of hashi it means chopsticks. When the accent is on the SHI of hashi, the word means bridge. The are also commonly known as otemoto (おてもと) which you may see printed on wrappers of disposable chopsticks.
In Korea the word is jeotgarak (젓가락) a combination of jeo “chopsticks” and garak “stick.”
In Vietnamese, chopsticks are called “đũa”, which is written as 𥮊 with 竹 trúc (bamboo) as the semantic, and 杜 đỗ as the phonetic part. It is an archaic borrowing of the older Chinese term for chopsticks, 箸.
In Filipino, chopsticks are referred to as “sipit ng intsik” which is a compound of sipit, which means “to grip” or pincers and “intsik” which means Chinese.
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