British and Irish slang for a shovel, playing on the stereotype of Irish labourers doing digging work. The term reflects the long history of Irish migration to Britain for construction and manual labour, as well as the tendency in British slang to use Irish as a tag for humble or heavy work. Now dated.
He kept an Irish banjo in the back of the van for when the job required a bit of digging.
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(slang) A shovel.
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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