Hone

How to spell hone

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hone

What does hone mean?

1. verbTo sharpen or refine something, especially a skill, to a high level of precision.
2. nounA fine stone used for sharpening the edge of a blade or tool.

Hone in a sentence

• verb

  She spent the summer trying to hone her presentation skills.

• noun

  He ran the chisel along the hone until the edge gleamed.

• verb

  The workshop helped me hone my writing into something far clearer.

• noun

  A drop of oil on the hone helps the blade glide smoothly.

Where does hone come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hone descends from the Old English word han, which meant a stone or a rock, and more specifically the kind of fine-grained stone used for putting an edge on a blade. The same Germanic root produced related words in the northern languages for a sharpening stone or a crag, and it is distantly connected to terms for pointed rock. For centuries hone named the whetstone itself, and the verb 'to hone', meaning to grind or sharpen a tool against such a stone, grew naturally out of that noun. By the twentieth century the verb broadened into its common figurative sense of refining a skill until it is sharp and precise. A modern spelling trap is the phrase people write as 'hone in', which is really a confusion with 'home in' (to move steadily toward a target); hone itself only ever means to sharpen or refine.

How the word is built

• hone (from Old English han: a stone or whetstone), used as both noun and verb