knife: [11] Knife is not a native English word, but a borrowing. It came from Old Norse knífr, which survives also in modern Swedish knif and Danish knif. It can be traced back to a prehistoric Germanic *knībaz, which also produced German kneif ‘cobbler’s knife’, and was borrowed by French as canif ‘knife’, but its previous ancestry is not known. [knife etymology, knife origin, 英语词源]