Quern
noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A mill for grinding corn, especially a handmill made of two circular stones.
"She is shaking in ingredients from various small bottles and querns produced from the pockets of her robes, and from the drawer in the wooden table."
- 2 a primitive stone mill for grinding corn by hand wordnet
- 1 To grind; to use a quern. transitive
"He could almost set aside the longing for Eyjan that ever querned within him—almost—in this place so utterly sundered from everything of hers."
Example
More examples"She is shaking in ingredients from various small bottles and querns produced from the pockets of her robes, and from the drawer in the wooden table."
Etymology
From Middle English quern, cwerne, from Old English cweorn (“quern, hand-mill, mill”), from Proto-Germanic *kwernō (“millstone”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʷréh₂wō (“heavy stone”), from *gʷréh₂us (“heavy”). Cognate with Tocharian B kärweñe, Lithuanian girna, Russian жёрнов (žórnov, “millstone”).
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.