I’ve lived in the upper Midwestern U.S. for nearly all of my life. I know what “tines” are, in the context of a fork, and that’s the term I’d use to describe them on a fork, on those rare occasions when I’d have to refer to them.
I don’t think that I ever use the term otherwise, but then, I have little experience with pitchforks (and other farming implements) or forklifts. 
I think I’d be more likely to use the term “prong” for anything other than the tines on a fork.
But you’d be WRONG!
… a 42 inch wide model 5000 rider reach truck manufactured by Crown Equipment Corporation … includes a power unit including a battery compartment, an operator’s compartment, a mast assembly, an overhead guard 35, and a pair of forks carried by a fork carriage mechanism [illustration citations removed]
cite: Patent: Straddle arm for fork lift truck US 6199665 B1
ETA: And UDS is WRONG too.
ETA 2: What’s that? Yeah? Well prove it. Yeah.
Hardly even worth checking unless you’re filing a patent or buying a forklift or parts and then they’d know they have a sucker on their hands.
Around my house, if it has four tines, it’s a “fork,” and if it has three, it’s a “threek.”
One for the Tolkien-nuts: a principal peak of the Misty Mountains is that called in the Common Speech [English], Silvertine (Elvish, Celebdil; Dwarvish, Zirakzigil); from the summit of which IIRC, Gandalf finally casts the Balrog down. One would infer that said mountain’s topmost peak is rather pointy in shape. (If anyone ever had a big vocabulary, JRRT did for sure…)
I have a friend who talks about his fivehead (a forehead plus a receding hairline).
and
A wild night out with St. Michael wielding his sword at Old Nic the devil and screaming at him, while deaf (Fr. “sourd”) to his pleas:
“Mickmichael’s soords shrieking shrecks through the wilkinses and neckanicholas’ toastingforks pricking prongs up the tunnybladders. ”
Sword/(toasting fork) gives us Wilkins razors, naturally, and is swung through the welkin (a word used in Shakespeare for “the space outdoors”).
To the best of my knowledge, “welkin” means “sky” or “the heavens”. None of my dictionaries define it as anything like “the space outdoors”.
Going on memory of* Twelfth Night.* Where, in fact, the dialogue essentially is on what the hell does “welkin” mean, anyway?
You’ve got it all covered, but for one more joke. I heard a comedian say that unsalted saltines should just be called 'tines (or was that 'ines?
Frankenstein, not Fronkensteen.
Hm, David and Ben Crystal’s Shakespeare’s Words defines “welkin” as “sky, firmament, heavens”, but has a separate entry for “out of one’s welkin” (used only in Twelfth Night) meaning “out of one’s element, none of one’s business”. The great C.T. Onions’ A Shakespeare Glossary defines “welkin” as “sky” but adds a note “used ludicrously in T[welfth] N[ight] out of my welkin”. The line comes at the end of a long sequence of word plays by Feste, and the Riverside Shakespeare suggests that he’s here playing on the fact that “element” and “welkin” can both mean “sky”, but “out of my element” is a common phrase while “out of my welkin” is not. The Riverside’s footnote on this line says “Feste gives a final example of how words can be made ‘wanton’.”
I might add that of the two Canadians who had never heard the term, I used in the connection with the the things that stick up in my dishwasher, two of which had broken off. I still think it appropriate to call them tines and somehow prongs seems wrong.
74 posts and only one mention of the tines on a rake? I thought that would be more commonly used than tines on a fork
I used mine this morning to clear the leaves from the street gutter and catchpit.
I am familiar with tine, but use it rarely. I, too, love the song “Tine after Tine”. I also love the one that goes:
Are you ringin’ in the ears
Stowin’ away the tines
Are you gatherin’ up the tears
Have you had enough of mine
Because dropping lots of forks makes that ringing sound that’s hard on the hearing.
However, the patent document has neither prong or* tine in it, so I must be missing something.
Now as to what is a tine and what is a pring - a spear is collection of “tines” when 1) each spear is adjacent to other spears, and 2) spear separation does not exceed two spear widths, and 3) each spear length does not exceed 10 spear widths.
Any other spear arrangement is composed of “prongs”.^
I think those two Canadians that didn’t know “tine” were just pretending to be Canadians. They were probably Belgians sneaking in to Canada from the US.
This was terrible. Bravo!
Ok. Help me out with the obvious joke or pun I’m missing. It’s been driving me nuuts.
Tyne Daly, actress.
Ah. I’m terrible at actor names.