Word.ws English Dictionary

whinstone

whinstone noun: a stone used to crush whin for use as winter feed for cattle.

whinstone: a stone used to crush whin for use as winter feed for cattle
Image: Rosser1954, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

whinstone (usually uncountable, plural whinstones)

  1. (usually) A stone used to crush whin for use as winter feed for cattle.
  2. (usually, quarrying industry) Any hard dark-coloured rock.
    • ‘A rough fellow, rather, Mrs. Dean. Is not that his character?‘ ‘Rough as a saw-edge, and hard as whinstone! The less you meddle with him the better.’1847, Emily Brontë, chapter IV, in Wuthering Heights
    Synonyms:
    whin

Synonyms of whinstone

Forms of whinstone

pluralwhinstones

Origin of whinstone

Possibly corrupted from quern stone, i.e. stone suitable for making querns; or else, from whin + stone.

Questions about whinstone

What does whinstone mean?
Whinstone means a stone used to crush whin for use as winter feed for cattle.
What part of speech is whinstone?
Whinstone is a noun.
What is the plural of whinstone?
The plural of whinstone is whinstones.

Words near whinstone in the dictionary

  1. whinnying
  2. whinnyingly
  3. whinnyings
  4. whins
  5. WHINSEC
  6. whinstone
  7. whinstones
  8. whiny
  9. whiny-ass titty babies
  10. whiny-ass titty baby
  11. whinyard

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whinstone (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “whinstone.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whinstone. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.