Beche

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A digging tool with a broad, flat blade, borrowed into English from the French word for a spade
2. An implement similar to a spade, used for turning over and breaking up soil, a term taken from French
3. A flat-bladed hand or long-handled tool for digging earth, a word that entered English from French

Etymology: The Latin "bidens" meant "two-toothed," and it named a two-pronged hoe or mattock for breaking up soil. The tool's name outlasted its shape. Over time it came to mean a spade-like digger with a flat blade, so the word's original sense describes teeth, while its later sense describes an edge. The likely route runs through Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin of Gaul, before reaching Old French as "beche." Scholars generally accept this chain, but the intermediate forms are reconstructed rather than directly attested, so the exact steps remain uncertain. English took the word from French, and French still uses "bêche" for a spade.