Where’s the axe in a poleaxe?

Few terms used in the study of medieval combat are as often confused or misused as the word “pollaxe.”Partly, this is due to the fact that modern people want to apply modern rules of logic to medieval subjects, something which is not supported by actually reading what medieval men wrote.They also tend to ignore the root forms of words and focus only on the modern forms, ignoring the shifts of language so apparent to the historian.