Dude, Where's My Spade? Trivia Quiz

A spade is a digging tool, used to cut turf and to make holes. It has a long handle for leverage, and a square-tipped blade that is inserted into the ground. Spades come in different shapes and sizes for specialized digging functions. The earliest spades used animal bones or wood for the blade, but the development of metal working saw a change to the more efficient thin metal blade we now expect to see.

A shovel is a similar implement, but with a blade that has a point, and a curved surface. Unlike spades, shovels are designed for carrying material from place to place.

The word rake comes from the Old English 'raca', which traces its origins to a Proto-Germanic word meaning to pile up. Rakes are used to gather loose material such as cut grass or leaves. They come in a range of shapes and materials, designed for different purposes. If you are raking leaves, you will find a rake with its tines arranged in a fan shape will collect them more efficiently than one such as shown here, which is designed to be used in soil.

It is specifically a bow rake, with the bow between handle and tines providing a mechanism for smoothing the loose soil or sand by dragging the rake across the surface with the teeth facing up, as shown.

Hoe is a generic term for a large variety of tools used in moving and aerating soil and in removing weeds. The blade is at right angles to the handle, allowing the user to swing it into the soil before pushing or pulling around the loosened material. If used for weeding, it is swung so as to enter the soil near the weed, and go in deeply enough so that it can be pulled back and collect the roots on its return. Hoes are also useful for creating mounds or gulleys in a garden bed, to place plants in an appropriate spot.

Sometimes just called a pick, this is a tool whose metal head has two different sides. One end, which is pointed, can be sued for breaking up hard ground, or prying rocks out of the ground. The other end has a flat blade resembling a chisel, allowing it to be used like a hoe to shape soil or chop through roots. Like an adze, this flattened cutting edge is in a plane at right angles to the handle, rather than being in the same plane as is the case for an axe, so the linguistic development from earlier words just meaning "pick" into the modern one should more properly have been a "pick-adze", but "pick-axe" may have found favour because it is easier to say.

More precisely, this is a pitchfork, with pointed and curved tines making it useful for scooping up material such as hay and pitching it into a new position (such as a haystack). A garden fork, which is used to loosen and turn over soil, has straight tines, which do not taper.

Its use is similar to that of a spade, but it is easier to insert into hard or rocky soil as the tines are more flexible than a spade's solid blade. It also is less likely to be accidentally pushed through a plant's roots and damaging them, as the tines tend to slide around roots.

The origin of this name is pretty obvious - a barrow was a device for carrying things, etymologically related to basket. The earliest barrows were called hand barrows, because they had projecting handles that could be used to carry the contents. These handles were on both sides, so that two people could share the load. The use of a wheel to replace the handles on one end turned it into a one-person job.

The wheelbarrow is thought to have originated in China, with the wheel placed near the middle of the load rather than at the end. That style of wheelbarrow is still widely used in Asia, while most European cultures use wheelbarrows with the wheel near one end of the tray.

In North America, these are likely to be called pruning shears, but in the UK the French-derived name is the standard for this hand-held tool used for cutting shoots and small branches. They can be considered a specialised type of scissor. Their cutting edges are extremely sharp, and the handles are usually connected by a spring-loaded mechanism that opens them when the squeezing pressure from the operator's hand is released. For safety reasons, most secateurs have a strap or other device which holds the blades closed when not in use.

If you are trying to cut a tree limb that is too high for you to reach with your secateurs, you can use a lopper, which has longer handles and requires the use of two hands. The longer handles also allow the exertion of a greater force, so they can cut through thicker limbs than is possible with secateurs and a single-hand squeeze.

A sickle can also be called a reaping hook or a grasshook. It is used for cutting long grass - such as when harvesting hay. If your lawn is high enough for harvesting, you probably should have had the lawnmower in action a long time ago. But a sickle does come in useful at times, such as in cutting off the head of a cabbage when you want to harvest it from your kitchen garden.

The sickle, which has a sharpened blade on the inner side of its curved blade, is swung with one hand, while the other hand may be used to hold the target in position or to collect the cuttings.

A scythe is rather like a magnified sickle. It has a long handle and a sharp curved blade which the user swings through the material (often long grass or a cereal crop) that is to be cut. As shown in the image, it takes two hands to wield a scythe, and they often (but not always) have hand grips at appropriate spots on the handle to allow a balanced swing.

As mentioned in relation to the sickle, the average household is unlikely to have grass long enough to make a scythe a useful tool, but if you happen to own a property large enough to have a field in which you want to grow some hay, this is the tool for you! Of course, you might also use a mechanical reaper, but they are rather expensive for the hobby farmer.

If you found the secateurs and the lopper to be ineffective when you were trying to trim all the leafy growth on an ornamental hedge, you need to get a hedge trimmer. This could be a manual trimmer, which resembles a large set of shears, with straight slender blades that you can place so as to cut off the uneven ends of the new growth as you squeeze the blades shut using both hands. If that hedge stretches all the way around your house, a motorised hedge trimmer could be just the device you want for Christmas.

The projecting bar has multiple small blades projecting on each side, which are made to vibrate back and forth in a cutting motion. It may run on electricity (cord or battery) or you may choose an engine run by fossil fuel - what you call the fuel will depend on where you live. You still have to hold it up into position, so the mechanisation doesn't completely remove the effort of tidying your hedge, but it goes a long way.