Word.ws English Dictionary

pet rock

pet rock noun: a rock one keeps and cares for as if it were a pet, often purchased as a novelty item and jokingly treated as having needs like those of a living animal.

pet rock: a rock one keeps and cares for as if it were a pet, often purchased as a novelty item and jokingly...
Image: Owner of Pet Rock Net, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

pet rock (plural pet rocks)

  1. A rock one keeps and cares for as if it were a pet, often purchased as a novelty item and jokingly treated as having needs like those of a living animal.
    • I made a cute family of pet rocks by putting eye, nose, and mouth stickers on big stones.
    • Though the fad ran its course long ago, the phrase “pet rock” endures in the American lexicon, denoting (depending on whether it is uttered with contempt or admiration) a useless entity or a meteoric success.[2015 March 31, Margalit Fox, “Gary Dahl, Inventor of the Pet Rock, Dies at 78”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Forms of pet rock

pluralpet rocks

Questions about pet rock

What does pet rock mean?
Pet rock means a rock one keeps and cares for as if it were a pet, often purchased as a novelty item and jokingly treated as having needs like those of a living animal.
What part of speech is pet rock?
Pet rock is a noun.
What is the plural of pet rock?
The plural of pet rock is pet rocks.

Words near pet rock in the dictionary

  1. pET plasmids
  2. pet play
  3. pet regress
  4. pet regression
  5. pet regressor
  6. pet rock
  7. pet rocks
  8. pet sat
  9. pet shop
  10. pet shops
  11. pet sit

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pet rock (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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Cite this entry: “pet rock.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pet_rock. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.