Game development

La tranche verticale is the vertical slice, and its first word has been lent to English three times over. In Old French trenchier was to cut and trenche was a cut: both what the blade takes off and the groove the blade leaves behind. English took the groove first, in the fourteenth century, and made « a trench » — a ditch cut through woodland long before anybody cut one across a battlefield. It took the cutting board next and made « a trencher », the wooden plate meat was carved on, which survives in « a trencherman », somebody who eats a great deal. Then it stopped borrowing for six hundred years and came back for the third sense, the slice itself, this time without translating anything: bankers speak of « a tranche » of debt and keep the French spelling and the French vowel. Modern French still holds the whole of it in one unremarkable word. Une tranche d’âge is an age band, une tranche horaire a slot in a schedule, la tranche d’un livre is its edge, and trancher une question is to settle it once and for all.