a tool used for digging, with a long handle and a metal blade. Picklike digging implement, one of the oldest tools of agriculture. It resembles the modern hoe but with a stone or wooden blade rather than a metal one, set at right angles to a long wooden handle. Though large-scale agriculture uses plows, harrows, and rotary hoes that open many rows of a field simultaneously, home gardeners and horticulturists may still use mattocks to loosen dirt and to chop weeds
The head has two long steel blades, one like an adz and the other like a narrow ax or the point of a pickax