Search the Dictionary

strument of steel, or of iron with a steel edge or blade, for felling trees, chopping and splitting wood, hewing timber, etc. It is wielded by a wooden helve or handle, so fixed in a socket or eye as to be in the same plane with the blade. The broadax, or carpenter's ax, is an ax for hewing timber, made heavier than th…

A pericarp in which the seed case opens or splits into two parts or valves.

A side or incidental blow; an accidental blow. With their by-blows they did split the very stones in pieces. Bunyan.

To cause to open in slits or chinks; to split; to cause the skin of to crack or become rough. Then would unbalanced heat licentious reign, Crack the dry hill, and chap the russet plain. Blackmore. Nor winter's blast chap her fair face. Lyly.

Wood or Cuban palm leaf split into slips, or straw plaited in a special manner, for making hats or bonnets.

The act of cleaving or splitting.

To part or divide by force; to split or rive; to cut. O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain. Shak.

Divided; split; partly divided or split.

A warp having more than two threads passing through each dent or split of the reed.

A narrow opening resulting from a split or crack or the separation of a junction; a cleft; a fissure; a rent. The mouse, Behind the moldering wainscot, shrieked, Or from the crevice peered about. Tennyson.

bers run diagonally, or more or less transversely an irregularly, so as to interfere with splitting or planing. If the stuff proves crossgrained, . . . then you must turn your stuff to plane it the contrary way. Moxon.

ion from a wrought nail. -- Cut stone, stone hewn or chiseled to shape after having been split from the quarry.

Split pulse, esp. of Cajanus Indicus. [East Indies]

by chance; also, the game played with dice. See Die, n. Dice coal, a kind of coal easily splitting into cubical fragments. Brande & C.

To split. [Obs.] Bailey.

Act of cleaving or splitting. [R.] Bailey.

To part asunder; to divide; to separate; to sever; to rend; to rive or split; as, disparted air; disparted towers. [Archaic] Them in twelve troops their captain did dispart. Spenser. The world will be whole, and refuses to be disparted. Emerson.

A curious fungus of the genus Geaster, in which the outer coating splits into the shape of a star, and the inner one forms a ball containing the dustlike spores.

outgrowths from the digestive tract; distinguished from a schizocoele, which arises by a splitting of the mesoblast of the embryo.

To split into scales, especially to become converted into scales at the result of heat or decomposition.