hatchet

noun

1. 1

   A small, light axe with a short handle; a tomahawk.

   “It must be admitted, Nick, you are a very literal logician—‘dog won't eat dog,’ is our English saying. Still the Yankee will fight the Yengeese, it would seem. In a word, the Great Father, in England, has raised the hatchet against his American children.”

   Buried was the bloody hatchet, / Buried was the dreadful war-club, / Buried were all warlike weapons, / And the war-cry was forgotten.

   The fellow was armed with a stone-shod spear, a stone knife and a hatchet. In his black hair were several gay-colored feathers.

   The metal axe continues for a long time to be made in the less efficient shape of the stone hatchet; stone buildings and tombs are made to imitate wooden ones; as Morgan pointed out, the names of family relationships in primitive languages reflect a pattern that has ceased to exist in the society in question.

2. 2

   figurativeBelligerence, animosity; harsh criticism.

   to bury the hatchet

   hatchet job

   “Dat true as missionary! What a soldier do, cap'in, if so much peace? Warrior love a war-path.” “I wish it were not so, Nick. But my hatchet is buried, I hope, for ever.”

   The savagery with which Michael Hofmann can wield a hatchet has earned him unlikely fans outside the literary circuit. A recent issue of Viz ran a cartoon of the critic, poet and translator urinating all over a phone booth, while two donnish FR Leavis types nodded appreciatively from a safe distance.

verb

1. 1

   To cut with a hatchet.

Forms

plural

hatchets

past tense

hatcheted, hatchetted

past participle

hatcheted, hatchetted

present participle

hatcheting, hatchetting

third person singular

hatchets