pickaxe

«pickaxe» in Mova's school dictionary: a heavy tool with a long wooden handle and a curved metal… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 2 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (a pickaxe, pickaxes); also pickax (USA)

meaning for a pupil

A pickaxe is a heavy tool with a long wooden handle and a curved metal head with a point on one or both ends, used for breaking hard ground, rock or ice. tree →

sense in the lessons

In history lessons miners, gold rush diggers and road builders use pickaxes; in stories and video games a pickaxe is a digging tool. In safety, heavy tools are for adults. Phrases: swing a pickaxe, a miner's pickaxe.

examples

• The miner swung his pickaxe at the rock. tree →
• Gold rush diggers carried pickaxes and shovels. tree →
• Workers broke up the road with a pickaxe. tree →
• In the game you need a pickaxe to dig for diamonds. tree →
• A pickaxe is too heavy for small children to use. tree →
• The climbers used an ice axe, a kind of small pickaxe. tree →
• Jack took a horn, a shovel, a pickaxe, his armor, and a dark lantern, and one winter’s evening he went to the mount. tree →

note

Countable: plural «pickaxes». US spelling is often «pickax». Often shortened to «pick». Not the same as an axe, which has a flat blade for chopping wood.

In the corpora

• Ruby played right up to bedtime and dreamt all night that she was being chased by a giant pickaxe.
• Ruby stops games an hour before bed now, and the giant pickaxe has gone.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «pickaxe» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.