Whetstone

//ˈʍɛtˌstoʊn// name, noun, verb

name, noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    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.

    "[…]for alwaies the dulneſſe of the foole, is the whetstone of the wits."

  2. 2
    A single instruction of the Whetstone benchmark, often expressed as a value per second.

    "The Prodigy 4 does 500,000 Whetstones."

  3. 3
    a flat stone for sharpening edged tools or knives wordnet
  4. 4
    A stimulant. figuratively
  5. 5
    Alternative letter-case form of Whetstone (“benchmark”). alt-of
Verb
  1. 1
    To sharpen with a whetstone. transitive

    "Near-synonym: hone (verb)"

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    An area of the borough of Barnet, Greater London, England (OS grid ref TQ2693).
  2. 2
    A large village and civil parish in Blaby district, Leicestershire, England (OS grid ref SP5597).
  3. 3
    A census-designated place in Cochise County, Arizona, United States.
  4. 4
    An unincorporated community in Clay County, West Virginia, United States.
  5. 5
    A surname.
Show 1 more definition
  1. 6
    A synthetic benchmark for evaluating the power and performance of a computer, primarily based on floating-point arithmetic.

    "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."

Synonyms

All synonyms
emerygrindstonehonehonestoneknife grindersharpener

Example

More examples

"Sand and gravel are stone broken into bits. A whetstone, flint, marble etcetera are ordinary stones."

Etymology

Etymology 1

From Middle English whestone, whetston, whetesston, from Old English hwetstān, from Proto-West Germanic *hwattjastain (“whetstone”). Equivalent to whet (“to sharpen”) + stone.

Etymology 2

The benchmark is named after the Whetstone compiler built at an English Electric Company division in Whetstone, Leicestershire.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.