Pickaxe

Pickaxe

Pickaxe on the ground
Other names	Pick, pickax
Classification	Digging tool
Types	Railroad pick, miner's pick
Related

A pickaxe, pick-axe, or pick is a hand tool with a hard head attached perpendicular to the handle.

The head is usually made of metal, and the handle is most commonly wood, metal or fiberglass. The head is a spike ending in a sharp point, may curve slightly, and often has a counter-weight to improve ease of use. The stronger the spike, the more effectively the tool can pierce the surface. Rocking the embedded spike about and removing it can then break up the surface.

The counterweight nowadays is nearly always a second spike, often with a flat end for prying.

The pointed edge is most often used to break up rocky surfaces or other hard surfaces such as concrete or hardened dried earth. The large momentum of a heavy pickaxe on a small contact area makes it very effective for this purpose. The chiseled end, if present, is used for purposes including cutting through roots.

Originally used as agricultural tools as far back as prehistoric cultures, picks have also served for tasks ranging from traditional mining to warfare. The design has also evolved into other tools such as the plough and the . In prehistoric times a large shed deer antler from a suitable species (e.g. red deer) was often cut down to its shaft and its lowest tine and used as a one-pointed pick, and with it sometimes a large animal's shoulder blade as a crude shovel. During war in medieval times, the pickaxe was used as a weapon.

Unicode 5.2 in the Miscellaneous Symbols block introduces the glyph ⛏ (U+26CF PICK), representable in HTML as ⛏ or ⛏, to represent this tool.