what is a rake

A rake is most commonly a long-handled gardening tool with a row of teeth at one end, used to gather leaves or grass and to level or loosen soil.

Main meaning: the tool

When people say “rake,” they almost always mean the outdoor tool you use in the yard. It works a bit like a broom for outside and comes in different shapes for different jobs.

Key points:

• Long handle, usually wood, metal, or fiberglass.

• Crossbar or head at the end with multiple teeth/tines in a row.

• Used to gather leaves, grass, hay, and other debris.

• Also used to loosen soil, make it level, or make shallow furrows for planting.

Common types of rakes

• Leaf rake: Lightweight, fan-shaped head, ideal for dry leaves and light debris.

• Garden/soil rake: Heavier, straight metal teeth, used for soil preparation and leveling.

• Hay or landscape rakes: Larger, sometimes pulled by machines, for hay or gravel.

Since your prompt looks like it’s for a quick explainer article, here’s a short, reader-friendly version you could use as the “Quick Scoop”:

A rake is a long-handled outdoor tool with a row of teeth at the end, used to pull together leaves, grass, or hay and to smooth or loosen soil in gardens and fields.

Other meanings of “rake” (quick note)

The word “rake” can also mean other things in English, though these are less common in everyday talk about tools:

• A slope or slant , especially in engineering or ship design.

• An old-fashioned term for a man who is an immoral pleasure-seeker (you sometimes see this in historical novels).

• Technical uses in fields like mining (a vein or fissure) and railways (a set of coupled rail vehicles).

For your SEO/context needs, sentences like this can also fit naturally in a post:

People online often ask “what is a rake” in gardening forums and trending discussions when they start doing yard work or see the word used in older books or memes.

Bottom note (matching your spec):
Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.