Stones

How to spell stones

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stones

What does stones mean?

1. nounPieces of rock, ranging from small pebbles to large blocks.
2. nounUnits of body weight, each equal to fourteen pounds, used chiefly in Britain.
3. verbRemoves the hard pips from fruit, or pelts something with rocks.

Stones in a sentence

• noun

  Smooth stones lined the edge of the garden path.

• noun

  The boxer trained hard and lost two stones before the fight.

• verb

  She carefully stones the cherries before baking the tart.

• noun

  The children skimmed flat stones across the lake.

• noun

  Her new diet helped her shed several stones over the year.

• verb

  The chef stones the olives before chopping them for the sauce.

Where does stones come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English noun 'stan', meaning a piece of rock, which traces back to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic 'stainaz'. The same ancestor produced the Dutch 'steen' and the German 'Stein', so the word has close cousins across the Germanic family. The original long vowel softened over the centuries from the older 'staan' sound into the modern 'stone', while the spelling settled with a silent final 'e' that marks the long vowel. From the literal sense of a rock came a wide spread of meanings: the hard pip inside a fruit, a precious gem, a hard mineral mass formed in the body, and, in Britain, a unit of body weight equal to fourteen pounds. The plural 'stones' simply adds the regular '-s' ending, and because it is a thoroughly native everyday word it has stayed spelled in a plain, predictable way.

How the word is built

• stone (from Old English stan: a piece of rock)
• -s (plural / third-person verb suffix)