Axe

An axe, sometimes spelled ax in American English, is an implement that has been used for thousands of years to shape, split and cut wood, to harvest timber, and as a weapon. It generally consists of a head with a sharpened blade, also called a bit, attached to a handle, also called a haft or helve, and takes many forms suited to different specialized uses. Before the modern axe, the stone-age hand axe with no handle was used for roughly 1.5 million years, and hafted axes with a handle date back at least 46,000 years among Indigenous Australians; the earliest hafted axes carried stone heads fitted to a wooden handle, and later axes were made of copper, bronze, iron and steel as those technologies developed.