A sharpening steel does not sharpen anything, and the name is the problem

This works through how a honing steel works in the order the parts actually depend on each other.

What happens to an edge in use

A knife edge is a very thin wedge of metal, and the last fraction of a millimetre is thin enough to bend rather than break. Ordinary cutting rolls that fine edge sideways, so it stops presenting a clean line to whatever you are cutting and starts pushing instead.

The knife then feels blunt while still carrying almost all of its original metal, which is the situation most kitchen knives are in most of the time. Under magnification a used edge looks folded and wavy rather than worn away, which is the observation the whole distinction rests on. A knife in this condition does not need material removed; it needs the material it still has put back where it belongs.

What the rod actually does

Drawing the blade along a hard rod at a consistent angle pushes the folded edge back into line, restoring the cutting geometry within a few strokes. The rod is harder than the blade, so it bends the thin edge rather than being marked by it, and very little metal is lost. This is why a steel restores performance instantly and why the improvement disappears again after another session of chopping.

The correct name for the operation is honing, or truing, and professional kitchens have used the tool this way for a very long time. Ribbed steels do abrade slightly, and ceramic and diamond-coated rods remove more, which blurs the categories at the edges.

What sharpening involves

Sharpening means grinding metal away from both faces until the two ground surfaces meet again in a new edge. That requires an abrasive, which in practice means a stone, a ceramic surface, an abrasive belt or a guided device with abrasive wheels.

It is a slower job, it consumes the knife over its lifetime, and it needs a consistent angle to produce a straight and durable edge. A knife that has been honed regularly needs sharpening far less often, because the edge has not been worn down so much as kept in position. Eventually every knife needs the abrasive, because honing cannot restore metal that has genuinely been lost.

Where the confusion came from

The rod has been called a sharpening steel in English for a very long time, and the name describes the felt result rather than the mechanism. From the user's side the knife goes in blunt and comes out cutting, which is exactly what sharpening is supposed to do.

Manufacturers have had no reason to correct a name that sells a tool, and knife sets routinely include the rod as the sharpening component. The result is a large number of households where the knives are honed weekly and have not been sharpened since purchase.

Those knives get gradually worse over years while their owners perform a ritual that used to fix them.

How to tell which you need

If a few passes on a steel restores the cut, the edge was rolled and honing was the right answer. If honing makes little difference, the edge has been worn or chipped and only an abrasive will help. A common test is to draw the edge lightly across a fingernail at a shallow angle and see whether it bites or slides.

Tested properly, cutting paper is another rough check, since a properly sharpened edge slices cleanly while a worn one tears and catches. Neither test is precise, and both are far better than continuing to hone a knife that has nothing left to realign.

A claim being badly sourced does not make its opposite true.

Angles and technique

The angle at which the blade meets the rod should match the angle the edge was ground at, and consistency matters more than the exact figure. European kitchen knives are commonly ground at a wider angle than Japanese ones, which are thinner and more easily damaged by aggressive honing. Very hard steels hold an edge longer but are more brittle, so they roll less and chip more, changing which maintenance they need.

Light pressure works better than heavy pressure, because the aim is to bend a very thin edge rather than to scrape the blade. A few careful strokes achieve more than twenty rapid ones, whatever the demonstrations in cookery programmes suggest.

The takeaway

Most kitchen knives are not blunt. They are bent, which is a much easier problem and a completely different tool.

Believing it was ordinary. Continuing to is the avoidable part.