A pickaxe is a heavy tool for breaking hard ground, rock, or ice. Picture a long handle and, at the top, a curved iron bar: a sharp point on each end, or a point on one side and a blade on the other. You lift it and bring it down. Miners, road workers, and people digging frozen earth use it. American spelling often writes pickax; it is the same tool. There is a smaller cousin just called a pick. You can also use pickaxe as a verb — to break the ground with one — but the home meaning is the tool itself. Though actually, the word looks like pick plus axe, and that is how English speakers reshaped it, because the tool feels like both. That is a folk story that stuck, not the older birth of the word.