Word.ws English Dictionary

reading stones

reading stones is the plural of reading stone.

Meaning of reading stone

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

Questions about reading stones

What is reading stones the plural of?
Reading stones is the plural of reading stone.

Words near reading stones in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: reading stones (page history and authors); 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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Cite this entry: “reading stones.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/reading_stones. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.