Compact and easily carried, the hatchet is used for kindling, carpentry, camping, hunting, and small-scale forestry. Its practical intimacy distinguishes it from the larger felling axe, yet its sharp blade gives it equally strong associations with danger. In poetry it may evoke frontier survival, domestic woodcutting, violence, or sudden severance. Because it can both prepare warmth and inflict injury, the hatchet often embodies the uneasy closeness of usefulness and threat, civilisation and brutality.

A hatchet is smaller than a full-sized axe and can generally be used with one hand. It is associated with kindling, camping, carpentry, survival, and small-scale chopping. In poetry it can appear harmlessly beside a woodpile or threateningly in a scene of violence. This contrast makes it effective for exploring the thin boundary between useful labour and danger. Related terms include axe, wood axe, tomahawk, chopping, kindling, cabin, survival, severance, hand tool, blade, domestic work, and the expression burying the hatchet.