headstone
Americannoun
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headstones
plural
noun
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a memorial stone at the head of a grave
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architect another name for keystone
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of headstone
Explanation
A headstone is a grave marker, usually inscribed with the dead person's name. You might visit your grandfather's grave each year, leaving flowers beside his headstone. Another name for a headstone is a tombstone or a gravestone. True to its name, a headstone is often made out of a large piece of stone, frequently slate, granite, or marble. The meaning of headstone was originally "cornerstone," or the stone at the corner of the base of a building, but by the 1700s it came to mean "stone at the head of a grave."
Vocabulary lists containing headstone
Ghost Boys
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The Young Man and the Sea
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In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Above my grave, a granite headstone, measuring six feet by three feet, will be erected.
From Salon ● Jun. 1, 2026
A few pens have been left on the headstone, which has been replaced at least once; generations of fans have attempted to obliterate “Hughes.”
From Los Angeles Times ● May 14, 2026
Other notable artifacts connected to St. Eustatius are a headstone from its Jewish cemetery, commemorating a merchant’s wife, and a Hanukkah lamp from Amsterdam that was eventually carried to St. Thomas by Jewish exiles.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 6, 2026
The words are carved into a headstone marking the grave of a young man, whose remains were found on a Cornish clifftop more than 40 years ago.
From BBC ● Apr. 29, 2026
I’m back in front of my laptop, faced with a greater challenge: the inscription for my headstone in no more than eight words.
From "They Both Die at the End" by Adam Silvera
In return, he’d get comforts for his death row cell, including a television, as well as $33,000 to pay off a restitution order and purchase headstones for his parents’ graves, The Times reported.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 22, 2026
Every year, local people come along and rub beach sand into the marble headstones so the names of those U.S. soldiers can still be read.
From Salon ● Jun. 9, 2026
The “expat graveyard” is filled with headstones of people who boldly declared, “We love it here. We’re never leaving.”
From MarketWatch ● Apr. 24, 2026
Beneath moss-covered cinder blocks, dilapidated stone markers, and a handful of headstones, more than 200 children who died in state custody between the 1870s and 1930s are buried.
From Slate ● Mar. 30, 2026
Laura’s cream-colored coffin was interred in the small non-denominational cemetery on the edge of town: unfenced, a hilly woodland meadow filled with black granite and white marble headstones.
From "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
