means To choose or select something from a group, or to pluck, pull at, or dig into something with a pointed tool or your fingers.

from A tangle of two old words braided together. The 'choose' sense and the 'poke/dig' sense both trace back to Old English picung and the verb pician, 'to prick' — kin to a whole European family of words for pointed things (think the French pic, the Italian picco). The tool we call a pick — that pointed digging implement — shares this stabby ancestry, and 'pickaxe' is itself a folk-reshaped form of the older 'pickax,' bent over time to sound like an axe it never quite was.