billhook

• bill-hook
• bill hook

Earliest use in weapon (and later, agricultural) sense, bill (“a bladed pike”) +‎ hook; other senses formed anew from various meanings of bill.

billhook (plural billhooks)

1. (weaponry) 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.
2. An agricultural hand tool often with a curved or hooked end to the blade used for pruning or cutting thick, woody plants.
   • 1869, Richard D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone, chapter 38:

     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, stiles for close sheep hurdles, and handles for rakes, and hoes, and two-bills, of the larger and straighter stuff.

   • 1886 May – 1887 April, Thomas Hardy, “chapter 19”, in The Woodlanders […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London, New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:

     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 executioner's victim.

3. (written as bill-hook) A part of the knotting mechanism in a reaper-binder or baler (agricultural machinery).
4. (written as bill hook) A spiked hook used in offices and shops for hanging bills or other small papers such as receipts.

   Coordinate term: spindle

5. (ornithology) (written as bill hook) A sharply pointed spike growing from the tip of the upper mandible of the hatchlings of honeyguides, used to destroy the eggs and kill the chicks of the host species.

• handbill, pruning hook, hack, hacker, hedging bill, hedging-bill, hedge bill, bill, broom hook, block hook, Yorkshire bill, vine hook

• → Irish: bileog
• → Welsh: bilwg

billhook (third-person singular simple present billhooks, present participle billhooking, simple past and past participle billhooked)

1. To use a billhook
   • 2010, Arto Paasilinna, The Year of the Hare: A Novel:

     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- grown hare.

• hookbill