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A pestle is the short, heavy stick you hold in your hand to crush , seeds, or medicine in a bowl called a mortar. The round end does the work; you pound or grind, you do not stir. English speakers almost always say the two together: mortar and pestle. Cooks use them for spice pastes; old pharmacies used them to grind powders. It is a simple object word, not slang, and not common in daily chat unless you are in a kitchen. Say it PESS-ul. There is a rare verb, to pestle, meaning to crush with one, but students will almost only meet the noun.
杵（研缽裡用來搗的那一根）
組成From Middle English pestel, from Old French pestel, from Latin pistillum, from pīnso (“pound, beat”). Doublet of pistil (the flower part) — same Latin word, two English lives.
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
pestlenoun/ˈpɛsəl/
- 1
A club-shaped, round-headed stick used in a mortar to pound, crush, rub or grind things.
- She then sat down by the fire, and carefully separated the stone from the pulp, which she burnt; and her next task was to extract the kernel, which she did by means of a heavy pestle and the hearth. The kernels were next crushed together, and placed to simmer over the furnace.
- 2
archaicA constable's or bailiff's staff; so called from its shape.
- […]whether the chopping-knife or their pestles were the better weapons
- 3
The leg and leg bone of an animal, especially of a pig.
- a pestle of pork
pestleverb/ˈpɛsəl/
- 1
To pound, crush, rub or grind, as in a mortar with a pestle.
- ‘Next time, boy, that you use that mortar for garlic, I will personally knock out your brain, place it in the said mortar, pestle it to a fine paste and give it to Dick Purser for feeding the dogs.’
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。