post-hole digger
1
6.7
- noun
- /ˈpoʊst hoʊl ˈdɪɡər/
:
ahoyador de postes
- The farmer relied on a post-hole digger to dig deep holes for planting new fence posts.
Examples
-
Okay, so, what's that? - That's a post-hole digger.
-
The driver jumped out of the pickup, went to the back, and took out a post-hole digger and sledgehammer.
Fiction book (1990) -
To set up the fence, I used a post-hole digger to create narrow holes for the wooden posts.
-
With the post-hole digger in hand, she was ready to start digging holes for her vegetable garden's trellis.
Synonyms
1
4.8
A tool with two long blades for digging narrow deep holes for fence posts
How Deep
Surface Forms
Morphology
post-hole + digger
The meaning is directly compositional: a 'post-hole digger' is a tool (digger) used to make holes for posts (post + hole). This noun–noun composition follows regular English compounding patterns and would be predictable to a B1 learner who knows the constituent words.
Etymology
Post-hole digger is named for exactly what it does: it is a tool that digs deep, narrow holes for posts, so it is literally a digger of post-holes. That's why the name means 'a tool for digging holes to set posts'.