axes

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of axe.

   The firefighters carried axes to break through the locked doors.

   Medieval soldiers swung heavy axes in close combat.

   Note

   The plural carries every meaning of axe, including the musician's slang. A rock guitarist's axes are guitars, and a jazz player's may be saxophones. That use belongs to talk among gigging players and reads oddly in formal prose. Traders have their own use of the word, for a position or interest in a stock, often one with an ulterior motive. The everyday case is still the tool and the old weapon.

2. 2
   SayAK-seezUS/ˈæksiz/UK/ˈæksiːz/

   noun

   Plural of axis.

   The two axes of the coordinate system intersect at the origin.

   Many crystals display multiple axes of symmetry.

   Note

   Here English keeps a Latin plural. Axis becomes axes, as the Latin axēs did, and the long final vowel makes it sound different from the plural of axe even though the spelling is identical. It is the working plural across mathematics, physics, biology and botany: the axes of a graph, the axes of symmetry in a crystal, the axes along which a plant's branches are arranged.

3. 3
   nounUS

   Plural of ax.

   The hardware store displayed a row of axes near the entrance.

   Pioneers relied on their axes to clear land for farming.

   Note

   Two spellings feed one plural here. Ax is the US standard spelling of axe. Because ax takes -es and axe takes -s, both spellings arrive at axes, so the plural never shows which spelling a writer prefers. The same letters also spell the plural of axis, a separate word from Latin that is pronounced differently. Context keeps the two apart: tools hang on a wall, while lines cross on a graph.

4. 4
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of axe.

   Whenever the budget tightens, management axes the least profitable departments.

   He axes the firewood into smaller pieces for the stove.

   Note

   The verb is transitive: something always gets axed, whether a log, a department or a program. The figurative use, to cancel or cut back drastically, carries a sense of roughness or ruthlessness that a neutral word like ends lacks. A rarer craft meaning, to furnish with an axle, shares the same form. An obsolete dialect use for ask parallels the one still heard with the American-spelled verb.

5. 5
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of ax.

   Management axes underperforming divisions at the end of each fiscal year.

   She axes the fallen log into firewood-sized chunks.

   Note

   American spelling gives the verb this form. Management axes a division and a woodcutter axes a log, exactly as with the axe-spelled verb. One caution: ax is also a dialectal, nonstandard form of ask. In transcribed speech, he axes me may simply mean he asks me. In standard writing, read it as cutting or eliminating, and keep the ask variant for representing speech.

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