billhook
To use a billhook.
Noun
- A medieval polearm, fitted to a long handle, sometimes with an L-shaped tine or a spike protruding from the side or the end of the blade for tackling the opponent; a bill.
- An agricultural hand tool often with a curved or hooked end to the blade used for pruning or cutting thick, woody plants.
- I worked very hard in the copse of young ash, with my billhook and a shearing-knife; cutting out the saplings where they stooled too close together, making spars to keep for thatching, wall-crooks to drive into the cob,...
- With a small billhook he carefully freed the collar of the tree from twigs and patches of moss which incrusted it to a height of a foot or two above the ground, an operation comparable to the "little toilet" of the...
- A part of the knotting mechanism in a reaper-binder or baler (agricultural machinery).
- Rare form of bill hook (“spiked hook used in shops for hanging papers”).
- Rare form of bill hook (“sharply pointed spike on honeyguide hatchlings' mandibles”).
Origin
Earliest use in weapon (and later, agricultural) sense, bill (“a bladed pike (obsolete)”) + hook; other senses formed anew from various meanings of bill.
Forms
Synonyms
handbill pruning hook hack hacker hedging bill hedging-bill hedge bill bill broom hook block hook Yorkshire bill vine hook
Related
Verb
- To use a billhook.
- Toward the end of July, Vatanen took a forestry job. It meant billhooking and chopping excessive undergrowth from the woods on the sandy ridges around Kuhmo and living in a tent with an ever more faithful, almost full-...