Jump to:

• stone-deaf
  stone-deaf

  adjective

  totally deaf.
• stone deaf
  stone deaf

  Totally unable to hear, as in Poor Grandpa, in the last year he's become stone deaf. [First half of 1800s]

stone-deaf

American  

[stohn-def] / ˈstoʊnˈdɛf /

adjective

1. totally deaf.

---

stone-deaf British  

adjective

1. completely deaf

---

stone deaf Idioms  

1. Totally unable to hear, as in Poor Grandpa, in the last year he's become stone deaf. [First half of 1800s]

---

Usage

Use of this word to refer to people with serious hearing difficulties is potentially very offensive: preferred form: profoundly deaf

Etymology

Origin of stone-deaf

First recorded in 1830–40; stone + deaf

Example Sentences

Almost stone-deaf, looking, in Virginia Woolf's phrase, like a ruined bust of Euripides, Meredith held court.

From Time Magazine Archive

Reason: since his widowed mother had to work, he had been raised mostly by a stone-deaf grandmother who rarely spoke to him and was afraid to let him outside to play.

From Time Magazine Archive

Her dam, Home by Dark, had never raced and was stone-deaf to boot.

From Time Magazine Archive

Engineer Tran Chan Cha, 46, has steamed the Danang-Hue run since the days of the Indo-China war, has been blown up so often that today he is nearly stone-deaf.

From Time Magazine Archive

Then I remembered that my shouting was in vain, for she was stone-deaf.

From My Brave and Gallant Gentleman A Romance of British Columbia by Watson, Robert