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:
“Adjoining a refreshment stand ... is a small frame ice house ... with a whitewashed advertisement on its brown front stating, simply, Ice. Glory to Jesus. The proprietor of the establishment is a religious man who has seized the opportunity to broadcast his business and his faith at the same time.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“And then finally theres your grandmother
Sweeping the dust of the nineteenth century
Into the twentieth, and your grandfather plucking
A straw out of the broom to pick his teeth.”
—Charles Simic (b. 1938)