whetstone

[hwet-stohn, wet-] /ˈʰwɛtˌstoʊn, ˈwɛt-/

noun

a stone for sharpening cutlery or tools by friction.

anything that sharpens:

a whetstone for dull wits.

Origin

before 900; Middle English whetston, Old English hwetstān. See whet, stone

Examples from the web for whetstone

Every five minutes or so he must stop, pick up a nine-inch long whetstone made of grit, and sharpen the blade again.
If you don't have a pedal grindstone, your options are limited to a file and whetstone.
But suddenly, everyone's honing their rumps on the whetstone.
Have a sharpening steel and whetstone on hand, too, to keep those blades sharp.
Learning to use a steel properly is far more important than spending the better part of a night laboring over the whetstone.
It's a teaching moment, a tragedy-free opportunity to sharpen our values on the whetstone of others' experience.

British Dictionary definitions for whetstone

whetstone

/ˈwɛtˌstəʊn/

noun

a stone used for sharpening edged tools, knives, etc

something that sharpens

Word Origin and History for whetstone

Old English hwetstan; see whet + stone (n.).

whetstone in Technology

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: C (ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/benchmark/whetstonec.Z), single precision Fortran (ftp://netlib.att.com:/netlib/benchmark/whetstones.Z), double precision Fortran (ftp://netlib.att.com:/netlib/benchmark/whetstoned.Z).
["A Synthetic Benchmark", H.J. Curnow and B.A. Wichmann, The Computer Journal, 19,1 (1976), pp. 43-49].
(1994-11-14)