Utility Knife

A utility knife is any type of knife used for general manual work, originally a fixed blade tool with a durable edge meant for rough tasks such as cutting cordage, scraping hides, butchering game and cleaning fish scales. The fixed blade utility knife has roots reaching back roughly 500,000 years to the stone knives early human ancestors shaped for general purpose cutting, and by the nineteenth century steel bladed versions had developed for outdoor field work such as butchering game, cutting wood and preparing meals; the later invention of the backspring produced pocket sized folding versions, and stronger locking mechanisms further expanded what the folding tool could be trusted to do. Today the term covers several distinct designs: fixed blade outdoor knives usually 100 to 150 millimeters long, small precision craft knives for carving and detailed cutting, and retractable versions common in construction, factories and warehouses, often called a Stanley knife after the genericized trademark, which take replaceable blades in trapezoidal, hook or concave shapes suited to materials such as drywall, cardboard, linoleum and carpet, and which craftspeople also use for marking cut lines, trimming and scraping.