Holystone
noun, verb ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A piece of soft sandstone used for scouring the wooden decks of ships, usually with sand and seawater.
- 2 a soft sandstone used for scrubbing the decks of a ship wordnet
- 3 A stone with a naturally-formed hole, used by Yorkshiremen for good luck.
- 1 To use a holystone. transitive
"Six days shalt thou labour and do all thou art able, And on the seventh—holystone the decks and scrape the cable."
- 2 scrub with a holystone wordnet
Example
More examples"Six days shalt thou labour and do all thou art able, And on the seventh—holystone the decks and scrape the cable."
Etymology
Uncertain, but equivalent to holy + stone. As an amulet, probably from holey (“having a hole”). As a scouring stone, variously derived from holey, from the amulet, from its association with Sunday cleaning, from its users' adoption of a kneeling position similar to prayer, and (least likely) from their original provision by raiding graveyards for tombstones.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.