headstone
Americannoun
noun
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a memorial stone at the head of a grave
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architect another name for keystone
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.
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
Not included: “A headstone or any other permanent memorial,” the site adds.
From MarketWatch • Nov. 18, 2025
Community members paid for the sturdy stone headstone.
From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 9, 2025
Next to its headstone in the graveyard of institutions, one might also place a marker for the era that publisher Henry Luce once labeled “the American Century.”
From Salon • Aug. 16, 2025
According to my mother, who would probably want some sort of live-and-let-live slogan carved on her headstone, the key was never to let a bully’s insults or aggression get to you personally.
From "Becoming" by Michelle Obama
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.
