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A block of stone used for sharpening the blade of a knife, chisel, axe, or sword. You rub the blade along the stone at a steady angle and it takes off a very thin layer of metal, leaving a fine edge. Many kinds are used wet, with water or oil on the surface to carry away the metal dust — Japanese kitchen knives are sharpened this way, and chefs, woodworkers, and all keep one. It is a plain, ordinary noun; nothing formal about it. English also uses it as a picture: something that sharpens a person or an idea rather than a blade — "hardship was the whetstone of his talent", "a good rival is a whetstone for the mind". That figurative use is the one you meet most often in reading, and it always carries the same feeling: the friction is unpleasant, but the result is a keener edge.
磨刀石（台灣店家和廚師也常說「砥石」，尤其指日式的水磨石）
組成whet + stone. "Whet" is an old English verb meaning "to sharpen" — so the word says exactly what it is, a sharpening-stone. It comes straight down from Old English hwetstān without ever passing through Latin or French.
同家族的字
- whetthe same verb, "to sharpen" — alive today mainly in "whet your appetite", which means to sharpen your hunger
原始詞典資料11 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。
Whetstonename/ˈwɛtstəʊn/
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A suburb and ward in the borough of Barnet, Greater London, England (OS grid ref TQ2693).
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A large village and civil parish in Blaby district, Leicestershire, England (OS grid ref SP5597).
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A census-designated place in Cochise County, Arizona, United States.
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An unincorporated community in Clay County, West Virginia, United States.
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A surname.
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computingengineeringmathematicsA synthetic benchmark for evaluating the power and performance of a computer, primarily based on floating-point arithmetic.
- Developed in the early 1970s by Harold Curnow and Brian Wichmann, Whetstones was originally released in Algol and Fortran versions but was later translated into several other languages.
- Whetstone reflects mostly numerical computing, using a substantial amount of floating-point arithmetic.
Whetstonenoun/ˈwɛtstəʊn/
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computingengineeringmathematicsA single instruction of the Whetstone benchmark, often expressed as a value per second.
- The Prodigy 4 does 500,000 Whetstones.
whetstonenoun/ˈʍɛtˌstoʊn/
- 1
A sharpening stone; a hard stone or piece of synthetically bonded hard minerals that has been formed with at least one flat surface, used to sharpen or hone an edged tool.
- […]for alwaies the dulneſſe of the foole, is the whetstone of the wits.
- It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from a livid whetstone, which was his spine; as if the switchback railway, having swooped to the depths, fell, fell, fell.
- 2
A stimulant.
whetstoneverb/ˈʍɛtˌstoʊn/
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To sharpen with a whetstone.
- Near-synonym: hone (verb)
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。