(n.) A thick, heavy knife with a hooked point, used in pruning hedges, etc. When it has a short handle, it is sometimes called a hand bill; when the handle is long, a hedge bill or scimiter.
Example Sentences:
(1) Resembling a billhook, with Foule Crag its wickedly curved tip, this final flourish looks daunting but can be skirted to one side, up awkward slabs.
(2) The Walter’s Tools library in Cumbria loans out a heritage collection of billhooks and scythes; modern share shops have shelves of useful stuff you only need occasionally, as do your neighbours .
(3) Foule Crag may sound Chaucerian, and indeed can prompt the kind of Anglo-Saxon language found in The Miller's Tale; it is as inextricably linked with Sharp Edge as is the wickedly curved tip on a Staffordshire billhook.
Machete
Definition:
(n.) A large heavy knife resembling a broadsword, often two or three feet in length, -- used by the inhabitants of Spanish America as a hatchet to cut their way through thickets, and for various other purposes.
Example Sentences:
(1) Groups of men with machetes have been roaming the ruins seeking supplies of food or water.
(2) Plainclothes soldiers, one of them with a plastic-handled kitchen knife in the pocket of his shorts and a machete visible under his football shirt stopped and questioned any outsiders.
(3) In response, predominantly Christian forces known as the anti-balaka (balaka means machete in Sango, the local language) launched counterattacks against the Seleka and perceived Muslim collaborators.
(4) Blakelock, while on the ground, suffered eight machete wounds to the scalp, a knife driven into the back of the mouth with only the handle visible, 13 knife wounds to the back of the body, and wounds to his hands and arms.
(5) The corporation received 43 complaints after Robinson used the phrase on BBC1's 6pm bulletin on Wednesday, hours after the savage machete attack that killed a serving soldier in London .
(6) Eighty-two-year-old Richard “Buddy” Weaver was killed by Oklahoma City police after he allegedly raised a machete at an officer who opened fire; neighbors later described Weaver as having schizophrenia.
(7) Government workers with machetes cleared fallen trees from streets while a vast number of uninhabitable houses prompted residents to erect makeshift shelters.
(8) She had been slashed with a machete, hit on the head, thrown into a hole and raped.
(9) The Haitian in whose house in Port-au-Prince we are staying – a prominent businessman and generally very pro-America – keeps a cherished machete on his wall.
(10) Robert Doggart, 63, and a former candidate for Congress, said he wanted to take his “battle-tested M-4” military-style assault rifle, “with 500 rounds of ammunition, light-armor piercing”, a pistol with three extra magazines and a machete to burn down “the kitchen, the mosque and their school” in the hamlet of Islamberg, according to a criminal complaint against him.
(11) He thwacks his machete into a stump to free his hands and reaches over a stone wall, groping for something in the vegetation beneath.
(12) Chaves is a rough, tough, durable fighter who is very dangerous,” said Brook, who was unable to fight for almost seven months prior to beating Dan in March, having been stabbed in the leg with a machete while on holiday in Tenerife last September.
(13) As interahamwe leader Adalbert Munzigura told Hatzfeld in A Time For Machetes: "They needed intoxication, like someone who calls louder and louder for a bottle.
(14) On 1 March, black-clad assailants killed 29 people with knives and machetes at a train station in the south-western city of Kunming.
(15) Michelle had been walking along the road in the village of Monjas, in Jalapa, about 50 miles from Guatemala City, when a man on a motorcycle pulled up alongside her with a machete tied to his thigh.
(16) Frances Toor, whose work had always been supported or at least tolerated by successive governments, began to fear that the new, highly conservative and anti-left government would close down her Mexican Folkways, as El Machete had been closed down by the government in 1929 (though it continued to be published, illegally, from 1929 to 1934).
(17) "If I'm checking IDs at roadblocks, knowing that person is going to be clubbed to death, I'm as responsible as if I wielded the machete myself," said Capin.
(18) Witnesses claimed that some of the miners were armed with pistols and fired first, while also charging the police with machetes and sticks.
(19) Vigilantes armed with machetes and clubs blocked the road leading away from the compound, stopping cars to prevent looters from driving off with heavy weapons.
(20) Two years later, it was there that he was hacked to death by half a dozen machete-wielding men.