whetstone meaning

• Noun: whetstone  'wet`stown
  1. A flat stone for sharpening edged tools or knives

  Derived forms: whetstones

  Type of: stone

  Encyclopedia: Whetstone, Arizona Whetstone, AZ Whetstone Whetstone, Leicestershire Whetstone, West Virginia Whetstone, London, England Whetstone, London

• 
  [Architecture]
  

  A piece of stone, natural or artificial, used to sharpen cutting tools.

  

  wheel window

• 
  [Computer]
  <benchmark> The first major synthetic benchmark program, intended to be representative for numerical (floating-point intensive) programming. It is based on statistics gathered by Brian Wichmann at the National Physical Laboratory in England, using an Algol 60 compiler which translated Algol into instructions for the imaginary Whetstone machine. The compilation system was named after the small town of Whetstone outside the City of Leicester, England, where it was designed.
  
  The later dhrystone benchmark was a pun on Whetstone.
  
  Source code: precision Fortran,

Examples

1. "dear nanny whetstone, i'm so very sorry.
2. metalworking, woodworking whetstone, sharpening stone
3. as was your intention, nanny whetstone has resigned from her post
4. emulation is the whetstone of wits
5. my whetstone . him, then cranly, mulligan : now these . speech, speech