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A spade is a tool designed primarily for the purpose of digging or removing earth.1 The first spades were made of riven wood. After the art of metalworking was discovered, spades were made with sharper tips of metal. Before the advent of metal spades manual labor was more inefficient at moving earth, with picks being required to break up the soil in addition to a spade for moving the dirt. With a metal tip, a spade can both break and move the earth in most situations, increasing efficiency.
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Etymology
English spade is from Old English spadu, spædu (f.) or spada (m.). The same word is found in Old Frisian spade and Old Saxon spado. High German spaten only appears in Early Modern German, probably loaned from Low German. Scandinavian forms are in turn loaned from German. The term may thus not originate in Common Germanic and appears to be a North Sea Germanic innovation or loaned. Closely related is Greek σπαθη, whence Latin spatha.
Designs of spades
Spades are made in many shapes and sizes, for a variety of different functions and jobs. There are many different designs used in spade manufacturing. The most common spade is a garden spade, which typically has a long handle, is wide, and is treaded (has rests for the feet to drive the spade into the ground). An Irish spade is similar to a common garden spade, with the same general design, although it has a much thinner head. A turfing iron has a short, round head, and it used for cutting and parring off turf. A digging fork, or grape, is forked much like a pitchfork, and is useful for loosening ground and gardening.
Digging tool
In gardening, a spade is a hand tool used to dig or loosen ground, or to break up clumps in the soil. Together with the fork it forms one of the chief implements wielded by the hand in agriculture and horticulture. It is sometimes considered a type of shovel. Its typical shape is a broad flat blade with a sharp lower edge, straight or curved. The upper edge on either side of the handle affords space for the user's foot, which drives it into the ground. The wooden handle ends in a cross-piece, sometimes T-shaped and sometimes forming a kind of loop for the hand.
Small and/or plastic toy versions of the same tool are used to dig sand castles on a beach or in a sand-box.
Other use
In the oil and chemical process industries, a spade is a round piece of metal with a small tab that is placed in between two pipe flanges to give positive isolation from the central atom; usually to prevent cross contamination between fluids or to allow work on the line. The name comes from the shape: a little like a garden spade. The small tab lets one see that the spade is in place. At Peterhouse, Cambridge, the expression "to hit spade" is used to mean "to chat up".
See also
Sources and references
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Etymology OnLine
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 7 November 2008, at 22:48.
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