A small axe with a short handle, designed to be held in one hand and used for chopping wood or cutting.
From Old French 'hachette,' a diminutive of 'hache' (axe), from Frankish 'happja.' The diminutive suffix shows it's a smaller version of a full axe, and the word entered English by the 13th century.
The phrase 'bury the hatchet' means to make peace, and it actually comes from a genuine Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) tradition of literally burying weapons as a peace ritual—one of the few English idioms genuinely rooted in Native American culture.
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