An ice pick is a tool used to break up, pick at, or chip at ice. It resembles a scratch awl, but is designed for picking at ice rather than wood. Before the invention of modern refrigerators, ice picks were a ubiquitous household tool used for separating and shaping the blocks of ice used in ice boxes.
Outside the USA, the term ice pick also commonly refers to a mountaineers' tool known in the USA as an ice axe.[1]
Like most other tools, ice picks have been used for more than their intended use. For example, mafia hitman Abe "Kid Twist" Reles used an ice pick as his weapon of choice. Fellow Murder, Inc. hitman Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss also employed an ice pick as a weapon. On the show Deadliest Warrior, the ice pick is featured as a "Mafia weapon", and shown to be capable of piercing through bone easily. In the 1992 movie Basic Instinct, multiple characters are stabbed with ice picks.
Neurologist Walter Freeman used medical instruments called leucotomes, and later orbitoclasts, both of which were essentially ice picks, to perform transorbital lobotomies. This operation was informally called "ice pick lobotomy": the leucotome was hammered into the patient's brain with a rubber mallet via the eye's tear duct.
Although the murder weapon in the assassination of Leon Trotsky was an ice axe, it is often described as an ice pick, which is incorrect in the United States (though quite correct outside the U.S.).[2]