A sickle is a hand tool for cutting: a short wooden handle and a curved metal blade shaped like a hook or a thin moon. You hold the plants with one hand, swing the sickle with the other, and the curve gathers the stalks in as it cuts. Farmers used it for thousands of years to harvest wheat and rice and to cut long grass for animals, and it is still used today in small fields and gardens, in Taiwan too. Keep it apart from a scythe: a scythe has a long handle and a long blade, you use it standing up with both hands, and it cuts much faster. The sickle is the small one you use bent over. Because it was the tool of ordinary farm workers, it became a political symbol — the hammer and sickle on the Soviet flag meant factory workers and farm workers together — so in English writing the word often points to communism, or to old rural life, more than to the tool itself. It also gives us the adjective in "sickle cell anaemia", a blood illness named because the red blood cells bend into that same curved shape. The moon can be called a sickle moon when it is a thin curve.