An ice pick is a tool used to break up, pick at, or chip at ice. It resembles a scratch awl, but is designed for picking at ice rather than wood. Before the invention of modern refrigerators, ice picks were a ubiquitous household tool used for separating and shaping the blocks of ice used in ice boxes.
Outside the USA, the term ice pick also commonly refers to a mountaineers' tool known in the USA as an ice axe.
Read more about Ice Pick: Other Uses
Famous quotes containing the words ice and/or pick:
“When the ice is covered with snow, I do not suspect the wealth under my feet; that there is as good as a mine under me wherever I go. How many pickerel are poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain! The revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them. At length the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the heavens again.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Research shows clearly that parents who have modeled nurturant, reassuring responses to infants’ fears and distress by soothing words and stroking gentleness have toddlers who already can stroke a crying child’s hair. Toddlers whose special adults model kindliness will even pick up a cookie dropped from a peer’s high chair and return it to the crying peer rather than eat it themselves!”
—Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)