whetstone

noun

1. A sharpening stone; a hard stone or piece of synthetically bonded hard minerals that has been formed with at least one flat surface, used to sharpen or hone an edged tool.

   “[…]for alwaies the dulneſſe of the foole, is the whetstone of the wits.”

   “It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from a livid whetstone, which was his spine; as if the switchback railway, having swooped to the depths, fell, fell, fell.”

2. (figuratively)A stimulant.
3. (alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of Whetstone (“benchmark”).
4. A single instruction of the Whetstone benchmark, often expressed as a value per second.

   “The Prodigy 4 does 500,000 Whetstones.”

verb

1. (transitive)To sharpen with a whetstone.

   “Near-synonym: hone (verb)”

name

1. A suburb and ward in the borough of Barnet, Greater London, England (OS grid ref TQ2693).
2. A large village and civil parish in Blaby district, Leicestershire, England (OS grid ref SP5597).
3. A census-designated place in Cochise County, Arizona, United States.
4. An unincorporated community in Clay County, West Virginia, United States.
5. A surname.
6. A synthetic benchmark for evaluating the power and performance of a computer, primarily based on floating-point arithmetic.

   “Developed in the early 1970s by Harold Curnow and Brian Wichmann, Whetstones was originally released in Algol and Fortran versions but was later translated into several other languages.”

   “Whetstone reflects mostly numerical computing, using a substantial amount of floating-point arithmetic.”