Fish hook

A fish hook or fishhook, formerly also called an angle (from Old English angol and Proto-Germanic *angulaz), is a hook used to catch fish either by piercing and embedding onto the inside of the fish mouth (angling) or, more rarely, by impaling and snagging the external fish body. Fish hooks are normally attached to a line, which tethers the target fish to the angler for retrieval, and are typically dressed with some form of bait or lure that entices the fish to swallow the hook out of its own natural instinct to forage or hunt.

Fish hooks have been employed for millennia by fishermen to catch freshwater and saltwater fish. There is an enormous variety of fish hooks in the world of fishing. Sizes, designs, shapes, and materials are all variable depending on the intended purpose of the hook. Fish hooks are manufactured for a range of purposes from general fishing to extremely limited and specialized applications. Fish hooks are designed to hold various types of artificial, processed, dead or live baits (bait fishing); to act as the foundation for artificial representations of invertebrate prey (e.g. fly fishing); or to be attached to or integrated into other devices that mimic prey (lure fishing). In 2005, the fish hook was chosen by Forbes as one of the Top 20 tools in human history.

The fish hook or similar angling device has been made by humans for many thousands of years. The earliest prehistoric tackle is known as a gorge, which consisted of a double-pointed stick with a thin rope tied to the middle. When angling, the gorge is laid parallel to the line and buried inside a bait ball, which can be swallowed easily by the fish. Once inside the fish's mouth, the bait ball often softens and gets fragmented by the pharyngeal teeth, and any pulling along the line will cause the freed-up gorge to rotate transversely and get stuck across the fish's gullet, similar to how a fish bone or chicken bone may pierce and obstruct a man's esophagus. They performed similar anchoring functions to hooks, but needed both ends to claw firmly into the fish's gullet to work properly.

The world's oldest fish hooks (made from sea snail shells) were discovered in Sakitari Cave in Okinawa Island dated between 22,380 and 22,770 years old. They are older than the fish hooks from the Jerimalai cave in East Timor dated between 23,000 and 16,000 years old, and New Ireland in Papua New Guinea dated 20,000 to 18,000 years old.

The earliest fish hooks in the Americas, dating from about 11,000 B.P., have been reported from Cedros Island on the west coast of Mexico. These fish hooks were made from sea shells. Shells provided a common material for fish hooks found in several parts of the world, with the shapes of prehistoric shell fish hook specimens occasionally being compared to determine if they provide information about the migration of people into the Americas.

An early written reference to a fish hook is found with reference to the Leviathan in the Book of Job 41:1; Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? Fish hooks have been crafted from all sorts of materials including wood, animal and human bone, horn, shells, stone, bronze, iron, and up to present day materials. In many cases, hooks were created from multiple materials to leverage the strength and positive characteristics of each material. Norwegians as late as the 1950s still used juniper wood to craft Burbot hooks. Quality steel hooks began to make their appearance in Europe in the 17th century and hook making became a task for specialists.^{[full citation needed]}

The hook can be divided into different portions from the back ends to the front:

The perpendicular distance between the hook point and the frontmost inner arc of the bend is known as the bite of the hook, which indicates the maximum depth the hook can be embedded or set. The width of the opening between the point and the shank is called the gap or mouth of the hook, which dictates the thickness of the tissue that the hook can catch.