Monday Word: Adze
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1word1dayadze [adz]
noun
an axlike tool, for dressing timbers roughly, with a curved, chisel-like steel head mounted at a right angle to the wooden handle.
examples
1. It’s as if she’s been carved like an archetypal totem, but with matte and glossy house paint, charcoal and oil paint on canvas rather than with a chisel or an adze from stone or wood. "A stolen, horribly damaged De Kooning painting gets the Getty conservation treatment." The Los Angeles Times. 31 May 2022.
2. March 15 is a crucially important day in U.S. history. As the man who taught me to use a chainsaw said, it is immortalized by Shakespeare’s famous warning: “Cedar! Beware the adze of March!” He put it that way because the importance of March 15 is, of course, that it is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union. Heather Cox Richardson on substack. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-14-2026
origin
Middle English adse, adese, going back to Old English adesa, of obscure origin
noun
an axlike tool, for dressing timbers roughly, with a curved, chisel-like steel head mounted at a right angle to the wooden handle.
examples
1. It’s as if she’s been carved like an archetypal totem, but with matte and glossy house paint, charcoal and oil paint on canvas rather than with a chisel or an adze from stone or wood. "A stolen, horribly damaged De Kooning painting gets the Getty conservation treatment." The Los Angeles Times. 31 May 2022.
2. March 15 is a crucially important day in U.S. history. As the man who taught me to use a chainsaw said, it is immortalized by Shakespeare’s famous warning: “Cedar! Beware the adze of March!” He put it that way because the importance of March 15 is, of course, that it is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union. Heather Cox Richardson on substack. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-14-2026
origin
Middle English adse, adese, going back to Old English adesa, of obscure origin
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Date: 2026-03-16 02:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-03-17 05:59 pm (UTC)