Stone

How to spell stone

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stone

What does stone mean?

1. nounA small piece of rock, or rock as a hard natural material used for building.
2. nounA precious or semi-precious gem set into jewellery.
3. nounThe hard seed at the centre of certain fruits, such as a peach or plum.
4. nounA British unit of body weight equal to fourteen pounds.
5. verbTo pelt or kill someone by throwing stones, or to remove the pit from fruit.

Stone in a sentence

• noun

  A smooth stone skipped across the surface of the lake.

• noun

  The ring lost a small stone from its setting at the wedding.

• noun

  She bit into the cherry and nearly cracked a tooth on the stone.

• noun

  The nurse recorded his weight as twelve stone exactly.

• verb

  The recipe asks you to stone the olives before chopping them.

• noun

  The old cottage was built from local grey stone.

Where does stone come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Stone is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English 'stan', which already meant a piece of rock or a hard mineral mass. It traces back to the Proto-Germanic 'stainaz', the same source that gives modern German 'Stein' and Dutch 'steen', and ultimately to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning 'to thicken' or 'to stiffen', the idea being matter that has hardened into a solid lump. The long 'a' of Old English 'stan' gradually shifted to the 'oh' sound we now hear, while the spelling settled with a final silent 'e' that marks that long vowel. Along the way English piled extra senses onto the same little word: the pit of a fruit (because it is hard like rock), a gemstone, and the British unit of body weight equal to fourteen pounds, which began as the literal weight of a standard stone used on a balance. Because it is short and phonetically regular, the only real trap is remembering the silent final 'e'.

How the word is built

• stone (a single native Old English root word, not built from a prefix or suffix)