pickaxe
Britishnoun
"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012verb
"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012Etymology
Origin of pickaxe
C15: from earlier pikois (but influenced also by axe ), from Old French picois, from pic pick ²; compare also pique 1
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Tylee’s body had been burned, Blake said, and leaving behind only “a mass of bone and tissue” and some DNA on a pickaxe and shovel.
From Seattle Times
The work “was perforated in seven places using rocks taken from the square with a pickaxe. Which is to say, there is a movement of intolerance toward what this palace represents.”
From Seattle Times
The women quietly passed around words of sympathy and encouragement, while Abdiwali's father took turns with the other men, swinging a pickaxe into the hard, dry earth.
From BBC
He took a pickaxe to every critical and commercial assumption about what movies could and should be, broke them wide open and reassembled the fragments into something radically strange and new.
From Los Angeles Times
"Netflix's Resident Evil is proof it's time to bury a pickaxe in the franchise."
From BBC
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
