In joinery and carpentry, the assembly called tenon and mortise makes it possible to assemble pieces of wood without third-party fixing elements such as screws, nails, or dowels. The pieces of wood are worked in such a way as to fit into each other. One of them is cut like a tenon and ends with a kind of parallelepiped tongue to form the male part of the assembly, while a notch of the same dimension called a mortise is dug in the other to form the female part. Etymologically, the term tenon comes from the Latin tenere, which means to hold.