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whetstone

noun
/ˈʍɛtˌstoʊn/US/wɛtstəʊn//ˈwɛtstəʊn/UK

Etymology

From Middle English whestone, whetston, whetesston, from Old English hwetstān, from Proto-West Germanic *hwattjastain (“whetstone”). Equivalent to whet (“to sharpen”) + stone.

  1. inherited from *hwattjastain✻ — “whetstone”
  2. inherited from hwetstān
  3. inherited from whestone

Definitions

  1. A sharpening stone

    A sharpening stone; a hard stone or piece of synthetically bonded hard minerals that has been formed with at least one flat surface, used to sharpen or hone an edged tool.

    • […]for alwaies the dulneſſe of the foole, is the whetstone of the wits.
    • It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from a livid whetstone, which was his spine; as if the switchback railway, having swooped to the depths, fell, fell, fell.

  2. A stimulant.

  3. Alternative letter-case form of Whetstone (“benchmark”).

  4. ›+ 8 more definitions

    1. To sharpen with a whetstone.

      • Near-synonym: hone (verb)

    2. A suburb and ward in the borough of Barnet, Greater London, England (OS grid ref TQ2693).

    3. A large village and civil parish in Blaby district, Leicestershire, England (OS grid ref…

      A large village and civil parish in Blaby district, Leicestershire, England (OS grid ref SP5597).

    4. A census-designated place in Cochise County, Arizona, United States.

    5. An unincorporated community in Clay County, West Virginia, United States.

    6. A surname.

    7. A synthetic benchmark for evaluating the power and performance of a computer, primarily…

      A synthetic benchmark for evaluating the power and performance of a computer, primarily based on floating-point arithmetic.

      • Developed in the early 1970s by Harold Curnow and Brian Wichmann, Whetstones was originally released in Algol and Fortran versions but was later translated into several other languages.
      • Whetstone reflects mostly numerical computing, using a substantial amount of floating-point arithmetic.

    8. A single instruction of the Whetstone benchmark, often expressed as a value per second.

      • The Prodigy 4 does 500,000 Whetstones.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for whetstone. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA