I venture to say you'll be snoring by the time I get to the runcible spoon."

Food will be sold at such downtown restaurants as Runcible Spoon and Turiello's.

Mystery surrounds the runcible spoon - the pickle fork with broad prongs and one curved cutting edge.

The term "runcible", used for the phrase "runcible spoon", was invented for the poem.

In Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, an exhibition fight with runcible spoons is held.

The word appears (as an adjective) several times in his works, most famously as the "runcible spoon" used by the Owl and the Pussycat.

In Lemony Snicket's The End, an island cult eats using only runcible spoons.

They dine on mince and quince using a "runcible spoon", then dance hand-in-hand on the sand in the moonlight.

The "Notes & Queries" column in The Guardian also raised the question "What is a runcible spoon?"

In the board game Kill Doctor Lucky, a runcible spoon is one of the weapons players can use to kill Doctor Lucky.

In Alfred Bester's novel The Computer Connection a runcible spoon is used to feed the captive Capo Rip during his rehabilitation.

In the Pretty Things song "Baron Saturday," (album S.F. Sorrow) the words "You've lost the runcible spoon" are used.

I'd never tried to eat a herring with a spoon, but I saw nothing resembling a fork, and dimly recalled that runcible spoons would not be in general use for quite a few years yet.

His most famous piece of verbal invention, the phrase "runcible spoon", occurs in the closing lines of The Owl and the Pussycat, and is now found in many English dictionaries:

We bought sporks, spoon-fork combinations also called, for those who remember the poem "The Owl and the Pussycat," runcible spoons, and the MSR brand of plastic collapsible cooking utensils.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines a runcible spoon as: "A horn spoon with a bowl at each end, one the size of a table-spoon and the other the size of a tea-spoon.

They smiled as Ms. Kunin's grandchildren Sara, 7, David, 9, and Will, 11, recited "The Owl and the Pussycat," their smiles broadening as Will clearly negotiated the phrase "runcible spoon."

Lear is known mainly for his limericks and for that absurdist/surrealist epic The Owl and the Pussycat; but he was a more rounded man of letters than a runcible spoon and a £5 note as a seaworthy vessel might suggest.

However, since the 1920s (several decades after Lear's death), modern dictionaries have generally defined a "runcible spoon" as a fork with three broad curved prongs and a sharpened edge, used with pickles or hors d'oeuvres, such as a pickle fork.

A player may attempt to kill Doctor Lucky by playing a weapon card (such as a runcible spoon, a monkey hand, a letter opener, or pinking shears) while the player's token is in the same room as Doctor Lucky and out of sight of all other players.

The Straight Dope, while treating "runcible" as a nonsense word with no particular meaning, claims that an unspecified 1920s source connected the word "runcible" etymologically to Roncevaux - the connection being that a runcible spoon's cutting edge resembles a sword such as was used in the Battle of Roncevaux Pass.