Word.ws English Dictionary

reading stone

reading stone noun: a hemisphere of glass used as a magnifier when placed with its flat side against a surface with text.

Noun

reading stone (plural reading stones)

  1. A hemisphere of glass used as a magnifier when placed with its flat side against a surface with text.
    • The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone, essentially what today we might term a frameless magnifying glass or plain glass paperweight. Scribes, illuminators, and scholars...2013 September-October, Henry Petroski, “The Evolution of Eyeglasses”, in American Scientist

Forms of reading stone

pluralreading stones

Questions about reading stone

What does reading stone mean?
Reading stone means a hemisphere of glass used as a magnifier when placed with its flat side against a surface with text.
What part of speech is reading stone?
Reading stone is a noun.
What is the plural of reading stone?
The plural of reading stone is reading stones.

Words near reading stone in the dictionary

  1. reading someone the riot act
  2. reading someone to filth
  3. reading someone's beads
  4. reading someone's lips
  5. reading someone's mind
  6. reading stone
  7. reading stones
  8. reading the car
  9. reading the green
  10. reading the mail
  11. reading the room

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: reading 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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