whetstone
/ˈʍɛtˌstoʊn/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.32 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A sharpening stone; a hard stone or piece of synthetically bonded hard minerals that has been formed with at least one flat surface, used to sharpen or hone an edged tool.
noun
A stimulant.
noun
Alternative letter-case form of Whetstone (“benchmark”).
name
A large village and civil parish in Blaby district, Leicestershire, England (OS grid ref SP5597).
name
A census-designated place in Cochise County, Arizona, United States.
name
An unincorporated community in Clay County, West Virginia, United States.
Example Sentences
- "[…]for alwaies the dulneſſe of the foole, is the whetstone of the wits."
- "It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from a livid whetstone, which was his spine; as if the switchback railway, having swooped to the depths, fell, fell, fell."
- "Near-synonym: hone (verb)"
- "Developed in the early 1970s by Harold Curnow and Brian Wichmann, Whetstones was originally released in Algol and Fortran versions but was later translated into several other languages."
- "Whetstone reflects mostly numerical computing, using a substantial amount of floating-point arithmetic."
- "The Prodigy 4 does 500,000 Whetstones."
Etymology
From Middle English whestone, whetston, whetesston, from Old English hwetstān, from Proto-West Germanic *hwattjastain (“whetstone”). Equivalent to whet (“to sharpen”) + stone.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: whestone, hwetstān, *hwattjastain
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈʍɛtˌstoʊn/
- British English: /ˈwɛtstəʊn/