coal shovel
1
2.4
- noun
- /koʊl ˈʃʌvəl/
:
pala de carbón
- When you get down in the mine, get that coal shovel in your hand, feel just as natural to you as a tick on a dog.
Examples
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Then there was the furnace, the poker for the furnace, the coal shovel, the drain in the floor, the stainless steel tub, and the green hose wound up.
Fiction book (1991) -
Two enormous coal shovels have already strip-mined thousands of acres, operating with a kind of ponderous precision, hollowing out the land to a depth of about twenty feet, and producing three million tons of lignite each year to feed a power plant whose stacks are visible to the south.
Academic text (2004) -
To clean up after the coal delivery, I used the coal shovel to transfer the lumps into the storage bins.
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The workers grabbed their coal shovels and began loading the truck with fresh supplies for the furnace.
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Each miner was required to carry a coal shovel to effectively manage the coal as they worked underground.
Synonyms
A small tool like a mini spade you hold in one hand to dig or move dirt
How Heavy-duty
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a hand-held shovel used for shoveling coal' is directly and transparently derived from combining 'coal' (the material) with 'shovel' (a tool for digging/moving materials); the compound denotes a shovel for coal. This compositional noun-compound pattern is common cross-linguistically and follows standard English modifier+head structure, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily understand it.
Etymology
Coal shovel is very literal: it is the shovel used to move coal into a fire or stove. That's why the name simply means 'a hand-held shovel for shoveling coal'.