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mattock

Archaic Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A heavy agricultural tool with a flat blade at right angles to the handle, used for breaking up hard soil and cutting roots.

Detailed Definition
Mattock derives from Old English "mattuc" and describes a versatile digging implement resembling a pickaxe but with a broad, flat blade suited to chopping through roots, breaking compacted earth, and rough cultivation. In poetry the mattock appears as an instrument of serious, physical labor—heavier and more demanding than a hoe, requiring strength and endurance. Its association with hard, rocky, or root-bound ground makes it an image of struggle and persistence, the necessity of working against resistance to prepare the earth. It also appears in gravedigging contexts, linking it with mortality and the final return of bodies to the earth. This double association with both cultivation and burial gives the mattock a somber poetic resonance beyond its straightforward agricultural function.
Example
Example in poetry:
The mattock's association with hard, resistant ground — roots, compacted earth, clay — makes it in poetry an image of effort against obstruction, the work that must precede the gentler operations of cultivation; A poet might write "he took the mattock to the old garden where nothing had been grown for a decade, the blade meeting the compacted earth with a shock that traveled up his arms like an argument he had not expected to lose"; In gravedigging contexts — from Hamlet's gravediggers to Hardy's rural elegies — the mattock appears as the instrument of the final cultivation, the ground opened for burial as it was first opened for planting; The mattock's relationship to the pickaxe — it shares the heavy-headed, long-handled form but substitutes a broad flat blade for the pick's point — connects it to mining and quarrying as well as agriculture, suggesting the general activity of breaking open resistant ground; In poems about clearing and beginning — starting a garden in overgrown ground, reclaiming land from neglect — the mattock represents the first violent act of reclamation, the necessary destruction that precedes new order; Virgil's Georgics describe the mattock (ligo) among the essential implements of the Italian farm, establishing the tradition of treating such tools with the respect due to civilization's enablers.
Additional Notes
Mattock should be understood by students as part of the broader vocabulary of digging tools alongside spade, pickaxe, and hoe, but occupying a specific functional niche: the mattock is specifically for hard, root-bound, or compacted ground that resists lighter tools. Its combination of cutting blade and breaking head makes it the appropriate instrument for the initial clearing of overgrown or neglected ground, and this association with first clearing — the violence that precedes cultivation — gives it its characteristic poetic context. Students should note the mattock's appearance in gravedigging contexts (alongside spade and pickaxe) as an implement of the final cultivation: the ground opened for the dead as it was first opened for planting. This connection between cultivation and burial — the ground that receives seed and the ground that receives bodies — runs through much of the agricultural vocabulary and is particularly concentrated in implements that both cultivate and bury. Students should compare the mattock's poetic use with that of the spade (Seamus Heaney's "Digging" is the obvious comparison) to understand how different digging tools carry different cultural and literary associations. Related terms: ploughshare, coulter, harrow, dibble, furrow.
Other Meanings of “mattock”
Also Known As
pick-axe grub-axe hoe bidens pick-mattock
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