Knife Shapes
  

Regular Paring Knife
Most used knife.  Use to peel, cut, and decorate fruits and vegetables, and all small cuts.

Trimming/Boning Parer
Use to bone and trim small items, such as fowl.

Sheep's Foot Parer
Use to slice and trim small fruits and vegetables.

Bird Beak Parer
Use to peel and garnish small fruits and vegetables.

Fluting Knife
Special pointed tip  for fine, delicate garnishing and fluting work.

Fork Tipped Tomato Knife

Pointed Tip Tomato Knife
Has a serrated edge to cut through the delicate skin of tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables.

Utility Knife
Use for cutting medium size fruits, vegetables, and pieces of meat.  Get thin or thick slices.

Boning Knife
Narrow blade makes it easy to loosen meat around the bone.  Also useful to remove fat. 

Bread Knife
Serrated slightly curved edge cuts through crust and delicate fruit skins without crushing.

Chef's Knife
The master of all kitchen knives.   Cuts everything:  onions, vegetables, cabbage, fruit, herbs.  Ideal for mincing and dicing due to blade shape that facilitates rocking.  6" and 8" are the sizes most used in a home kitchen.

Santoku  Knife
Japanese chef's all purpose knife.  "San" means three; "toku" means good things.  A santoku knife does three, that is to say, many good things in the kitchen.    In other words, it is the Japanese chef's all purpose knife, the equivalent of a European chef's knife.  Cuts everything:  onions, vegetables, cabbage, fruit, herbs, meat.  Ideal for mincing and dicing due to blade shape that facilitates rocking. 

Slicer
Use to cut roasts, ham, and turkey into perfect thick or thin slices.

Hollow Ground Slicer
Use to cut thin slices from large boneless pieces of meat.

Filleting  Knife
Thin flexible blade, sometimes also narrow, for precise fit between fish and bones, or thin slices of meats and soft fruits and vegetables.

Curved Tine Fork
Curved tines to penetrate,  lift and turn meat.

Straight Tine Fork
Straight tines to so that fork does not interfere with carving knife.

Chinese Cooking Knife
Chinese chef's all purpose knife.  The Chinese cooking knife, sometimes called Chinese "cleaver," is the Chinese all round knife.  It has a thin flat blade.  It is used to chop, dice, mince, slice, much like a European chef's knife, but also fillet, due to the thinness of the blade.  Do not use it to chop bones; for that you need a European bone cleaver which has a very thick blade.

Meat Cleaver
Use to hack through bones, joints, and cartilage.

Honing Steel
To maintain a sharp edge, steel your knife frequently.  Draw it along the steel maintaining an angle or 15° to 20°.  Use a light touch.