get blood out of a stone
get blood out of a stone verb: to do something difficult, frustrating, or pointless.
Verb
get blood out of a stone (third-person singular simple present gets blood out of a stone, present participle getting blood out of a stone, simple past got blood out of a stone, past participle (UK) got blood out of a stone or (US) gotten blood out of a stone)
- To do something difficult, frustrating, or pointless.
- Bradley looked at the fire, with a working face, and was silent for a while. At last he said, with what seemed an inconsistent composure of voice and feature: ‘You can’t get blood out of a stone, Riderhood.’1864 May – 1865 November, Charles Dickens, chapter 15, in Our Mutual Friend. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1865, →OCLC
- "I suppose the law has some protection to offer them."
"Can the law get blood out of a stone? I haven't any money. I've got about a hundred pounds."1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XII, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC
Synonyms of get blood out of a stone
Forms of get blood out of a stone
| third-person singular present | gets blood out of a stone |
|---|---|
| present participle | getting blood out of a stone |
| past | got blood out of a stone |
| past participle UK | got blood out of a stone |
| past participle US | gotten blood out of a stone |
| alternative form | get blood from a stone |
| alternative form | get blood from/out of a turnip |
Questions about get blood out of a stone
- What does get blood out of a stone mean?
- Get blood out of a stone means to do something difficult, frustrating, or pointless.
- What part of speech is get blood out of a stone?
- Get blood out of a stone is a verb.
- What is the past tense of get blood out of a stone?
- The past tense of get blood out of a stone is got blood out of a stone.
Words near get blood out of a stone in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: get blood out of a stone (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-get blood out of a stone.ogg.
Cite this entry: “get blood out of a stone.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/get_blood_out_of_a_stone. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.