small spade for clay soil; the other one for sandy soil and loamy soil

A spade is a tool designed primarily for the purpose of digging or removing earth.^[1] The first spades were made of graven wood. After the art of metalworking was discovered, spades were made with sharper tips of metal. Before the advent of metal spades manual labor was more inefficient at moving earth, with picks being required to break up the soil in addition to a spade for moving the dirt. With a metal tip, a spade can both break and move the earth in most situations, increasing efficiency. Spade may refer to: spade, a digging and gardening tool Cards: Spades (card game), a trick-taking card game Spades (suit), one of four suits in playing cards Other to call a spade a spade, proverb Spade, derogatory racial slang for a black person; see List of ethnic slurs#Spade... Download high resolution version (811x1666, 274 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Download high resolution version (811x1666, 274 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Loam field Loam is soil composed of sand, silt, and clay in relatively even concentration (about 40-40-20% concentration respectively). ...

Etymology

English spade is from Old English spadu, spædu (f.) or spada (m.). The same word is found in Old Frisian spade and Old Saxon spado. High German spaten only appears in Early Modern German, propably loaned from Low German. Scandinavian forms are in turn loaned from German. The term may thus not originate in Common Germanic and appears to be a North Sea Germanic innovation or loaned. Closely related is Greek σπαθη, whence Latin spatha. Old Frisian was the West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries by the people who, from their ancient homes in North Germany and Denmark, had settled in the area between the Rhine and Elbe on the European North Sea coast in the 4th and 5th centuries. ... Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, is a Germanic language. ... Early New High German (ENHG) is a term for the period in the history of the German language, generally defined, following Wilhelm Scherer, as the period 1350 to 1650. ... Map of the Pre-Roman Iron Age culture(s) associated with Proto-Germanic, ca 500 BC-50 BC. The area south of Scandinavia is the Jastorf culture Proto-Germanic, the proto-language believed by scholars to be the common ancestor of the Germanic languages, includes among its descendants Swedish, Norwegian... The Anglo-Frisian languages (also known as Ingvaeonic languages, North Sea Germanic languages or sometimes Insular Germanic) are a group of West Germanic languages consisting of Old English, Old Frisian, and their descendants. ... The spatha was a type of straight sword with a long point, measuring between 0. ...

Designs of spades

Spades are made in many shapes and sizes, for a variety of different functions and jobs. There are many different designs used in spade manufacturing. The most common spade is a garden spade, which typically has a long handle, is wide, and is treaded (has rests for the feet to drive the spade into the ground). An Irish spade is similar to a common garden spade, with the same general design, although it has a much thinner head. A turfing iron has a short, round head, and it used for cutting and parring off turf. A digging fork, or grape, is forked much like a pitchfork, and is useful for loosening ground and gardening.

Digging tool

In gardening, a spade is a hand tool used to dig or loosen ground, or to break up clumps in the soil. Together with the fork it forms one of the chief implements wielded by the hand in agriculture and horticulture. It is sometimes considered a type of shovel. Its typical shape is a broad flat blade with a sharp lower edge, straight or curved. The upper edge on either side of the handle affords space for the user's foot, which drives it into the ground. The wooden handle ends in a cross-piece, sometimes T-shaped and sometimes forming a kind of loop for the hand. A gardener Gardening is the practice of growing flowering plants, vegetables, and fruits. ... For other uses, see Tool (disambiguation). ... Shovel with wide blade - especially appropriate for lifting snow or coal A shovel is a tool for lifting and moving loose material such as coal, gravel, snow, soil, or sand. ... A blade is the flat part of a tool or weapon that normally has a cutting edge and/or pointed end typically made of a metal, most recently, steel intentionally used to cut, stab, slice, throw, thrust, or strike an animate or inainimate object. ...

Small and/or plastic toy versions of the same tool are used to dig sand castles on a beach or in a sand-box. For other uses, see Beach (disambiguation). ... A large, loosely contained sandbox This article is about the playground equipment. ...

Other use

In the oil and chemical process industries, a spade is a round piece of metal with a small tab that is placed in between two pipe flanges to give positive isolation from the central atom; usually to prevent cross contamination between fluids or to allow work on the line. The name comes from the shape: a little like a garden spade. The small tab lets one see that the spade is in place. At Peterhouse, Cambridge, the expression "to hit spade" is used to mean "to chat up".

Sources and references

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Shovels and spades

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• Etymology OnLine