| / English Dictionary |
TOMBSTONE
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A stone that is used to mark a grave
Synonyms:
gravestone; headstone; tombstone
Classified under:
Nouns denoting man-made objects
Hypernyms ("tombstone" is a kind of...):
memorial; monument (a structure erected to commemorate persons or events)
stone (building material consisting of a piece of rock hewn in a definite shape for a special purpose)
Holonyms ("tombstone" is a part of...):
grave; tomb (a place for the burial of a corpse (especially beneath the ground and marked by a tombstone))
Context examples:
Fierer and Brewer found that graveyards are in fact places of the undead — in the form of microbes on tombstones.
(Tales from the crypt: Life after death in a graveyard, National Science Foundation)
Why, it's them that, not content with printin' lies on paper an' preachin' them out of pulpits, does want to be cuttin' them on the tombstones.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
When exposed to microbially-produced acids, granite tombstones gradually become pitted as bits of rock are dissolved.
(Tales from the crypt: Life after death in a graveyard, National Science Foundation)
Finally the man, too, got angry, and jumped down and kicked the dog, and then took it by the scruff of the neck and half dragged and half threw it on the tombstone on which the seat is fixed.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
In contrast to the surfaces of granite gravestones, those of limestone tombstones are less acidic.
(Tales from the crypt: Life after death in a graveyard, National Science Foundation)
Making straight for the steep cliff, where the churchyard hangs over the laneway to the East Pier so steeply that some of the flat tombstones—thruff-steans or through-stones, as they call them in the Whitby vernacular—actually project over where the sustaining cliff has fallen away, it disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
The scientists found that granite tombstones hosted microbes capable of acidifying their environment — then surviving those acidic conditions.
(Tales from the crypt: Life after death in a graveyard, National Science Foundation)
"But," I said, surely you are not quite correct, for you start on the assumption that all the poor people, or their spirits, will have to take their tombstones with them on the Day of Judgment.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
For example, microbes that flourish on granite gravestones in Maine are more like those growing on granite gravestones in Belgium than they are to those on limestone tombstones just feet away.
(Tales from the crypt: Life after death in a graveyard, National Science Foundation)
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