Whet your appetite
Meaning
To have your interest in something, especially food, stimulated.
Origin
This phrase is often confused with 'wet your whistle'
. Uncertainty about the spelling of the first word, either as whet or wet, leads to both phrases being wrongly spelled too. In fact there's no connection between the two terms, which are properly spelled as 'whet your appetite' and 'wet your whistle'.

The allusion in the former is to the sharpening of tools on a whetstone (grindstone) and
to whet means just
to sharpen. So, 'whetting our appetite' is 'sharpening our appetite'.
'Wet your whistle' predates 'whet your appetite' by some centuries, and was first recorded in the 1386
Towneley Mysteries:
"Had She oones Wett Hyr Whystyll She couth Syng full clere Hyr pater noster."
Whistle here means throat or voice and the phrase just means 'take a drink'.
You may see it put about that 'wet your whistle' derives from the practice of using a whistle in the taverns of Olde Englande to summon the landlord with more drinks. This is complete tosh. The Internet makes it easy to circulate information; unfortunately it isn't discriminating and stories like that tend to gain a foothold quite quickly.
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