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In woodworking, the tongue cut on the end of one piece of wood so that it slides tightly into a matching hole in another piece. The hole is called a , and the two together make a and tenon joint — one of the oldest and strongest ways to join wood, used in furniture, doors, window frames and wooden buildings for thousands of years. Picture a chair: the leg has a hole, the side rail has a tongue, and the tongue goes into the hole. The tongue is the tenon. The beauty of it is that the wood itself holds the wood; glue helps, but the shape is doing the work, which is why old furniture made this way survives when screwed furniture falls apart. You will almost always meet the word paired with — " and tenon" is said as one phrase. It can also be a verb, to tenon, meaning to cut such a tongue on a piece of wood, though that use is rare and mostly heard among people who actually do the work. Chinese carpentry knows this idea very well; 榫 is the same thing, and traditional Chinese wooden buildings are built with it.
榫頭（木工的凸出部分，插進另一塊木頭的卯眼／榫眼；mortise and tenon 就是榫卯）
組成Came into English through French — Anglo-Norman tenoun, from Old French tenon — during the Middle English period, when a great deal of building and craft vocabulary crossed over from French.
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Tenonname
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A surname from French.
tenonnoun/ˈtɛn.ən/
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A projecting member left by cutting away the wood around it, and made to insert into a mortise, and in this way secure together the parts of a frame.
- A keyed mortise-and-tenon joint is constructed the same as a doweled mortise and tenon joint except that the tenon projects far enough through the mortise to admit the insertion of a tapering key which draws the mortised piece firmly against the shoulder of the tenon.
- One soon learned, however, that it was no easy thing to make wood do exactly as one required it. It looked quite easy in the masterly hands of the experienced pattern-maker, but the mysteries of dowelling and mortice and tenon were not uncovered in a week or two.
tenonverb/ˈtɛn.ən/
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To make into a tenon.
- First we'll tenon this part, then we'll make a mortise that will fit it on that part.
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To fit with tenons.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。