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A metal spike with a hole for a rope
Answer for the clue "A metal spike with a hole for a rope ", 5 letters:
piton
Alternative clues for the word piton
Word definitions for piton in dictionaries
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Word definitions in The Collaborative International Dictionary
piton \pi"ton\ (p[=e]"t[o^]n), n. (Mountain Climbing) A metal spike having a sharpened point on one end, and a hole through which a rope can be passed on the other; it is driven into the face of a rock cliff during climbing, and used as an anchor point ...
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Word definitions in Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1898, from French piton "hook, peak of a mountain, piton, eyebolt," in Old French "nail, hook," from Vulgar Latin root *pitt- "point, peak" [Barnhart].
Usage examples of piton.
Not having driven one piton, he was going to attempt a five-day climb up the nearly sheer western counterfort.
It grew more and more difficult, and he often had to lay in protection, driving a piton into a crack of the firm granite.
He bent carefully to his equipment sling, replaced the used piton, and took up a shorter one.
The shorter piton went to its eye in five hammer strokes and he could do nothing to dislodge it.
Anchoring two pitons into the rock as solidly as he could, he clipped an oval carabiner on the bottom piton, put a safety line on the top one, and lowered himself about sixty feet down the two ropes.
He feared that the piton to which he was anchored would not take the strain, and would pull out.
Scot gestured toward where Nick had wisely chosen a new location in the rock crevice in which to drive a piton, so as not to disturb the area Harvath had pointed out earlier.
Somehow it had gotten caught on a piton and, with the downward weight of his body, was threatening to cut off all of his oxygen and strangle him.
He pulled out his pressure-gun, fired a piton into the rockwall, looped his rope around it.
West saw the rope go slack, now only hanging from its piton at his end.
Nodding ruefully, I pull a piton gun from my pack and harpoon the planet.
Randi fires a piton in too, clips on, then clips another line between her belt and mine.
Working with her right hand, she sets one piton and then another, hammering them in with her fist.
Quickly Randi connects the new line to the line that still connects them, slack now, and loops it around the piton she has just set.
Thirty meters below her, Ed bounces as the line pulls taut and pops the piton out of the wall in another shower of debris.