a digging implement with a flat, usu rectangular, metal blade and that can be pushed into the ground with the foot and is attached to a long handle
call a spade a spade
to speak frankly and usu bluntly
‘When I see a spade I call it a spade.’ ‘I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade.’ — Oscar Wilde
[based on a mistranslation of a phrase in Plutarch (1c–2c AD), who used the Greek word skaphe meaning ‘bowl’ or ‘basin’, which Erasmus evidently confused with skapheion, derived from skaphein ‘to dig’, turning it into Latin as ligo meaning ‘mattock’; this in turn was translated by the dramatist and scholar Nicholas Udall (1542) into English as ‘spade’]spadeful (pl spadefuls) noun
[Old English spadu]