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Headstone   /hˈɛdstˌoʊn/   Listen
Headstone

noun
1.
The central building block at the top of an arch or vault.  Synonyms: key, keystone.
2.
A stone that is used to mark a grave.  Synonyms: gravestone, tombstone.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Headstone" Quotes from Famous Books



... We have graves of our own, our family has. Why my uncle Podger has a tomb in Kensal Green Cemetery, that is the pride of all that country-side; and my grandfather's vault at Bow is capable of accommodating eight visitors, while my great-aunt Susan has a brick grave in Finchley Churchyard, with a headstone with a coffee- pot sort of thing in bas-relief upon it, and a six-inch best white stone coping all the way round, that cost pounds. When I want graves, it is to those places that I go and revel. I do not want other folk's. When ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome

... Berenice and Coralie's dresser from the theatre, with a couple of supernumeraries and the disconsolate Camusot. All the men accompanied the actress to her last resting-place in Pere Lachaise. Camusot, shedding hot tears, had solemnly promised Lucien to buy the grave in perpetuity, and to put a headstone ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... a boy will show you his grave. It is back of the town near a little bridge that spans a mangrove swamp. A plain slab of wood stands at its head. Some one has burned upon the headstone with a hot iron ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... words, She rose in haste, and to her chamber went, And shut the door; nor if, when she came forth, A dawn of holier purpose gleamed across The sadness of her brow. But this I know, That, on a warm autumnal afternoon, When headstone-shadows crossed three neighbour graves, And, like an ended prayer, the empty church Stood in the sunshine, or a cenotaph, A little boy, who watched a cow near by Gather her milk where alms of clover-fields Lay ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... his heirs were too intent on being in at the death to care for his memory. They neither preserved the data of his life, nor over his grave placed a headstone. The monument that now marks his resting-place was recently erected by the State of Massachusetts. He was buried in the Old Granary Burying-Ground, on Tremont Street, and only a step from his grave ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... disappointment. The tenderest woman about whose knees cluster living children, and who has sowed in tears the blessed seed, that in the resurrection-morn shall be gathered in beauteous sheaves of richest recompense—would smile in pitying contempt over the tiny headstone which ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... he said gently. "Give the lad his due. He was brave that one time. He saved all those lives as it is chiseled on his headstone. It is better he should be remembered for the best act in his life than for the worst one. A man's measure should be taken when he's stretched up to his full height, just as far as he can lift up his head; not when he's stooped to the lowest. ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston

... mother were dead these ten years. He had sent home money to pay the funeral expenses and buy a substantial headstone. But he had not been up to the cemetery yet. He was not a sentimental man. Still, he had expected his return to make some little stir in Tregarrick, and now a shade of disappointment began to ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... the other side of the hearthstone. "I spend a good quarter of my time in the churchyard; but when I saw those six little mounds, and read the inscriptions over them, I couldn't help feeling queer. Think of this! On the first tiny headstone I read ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green

... suddenly inspired sunk to his knees and hurriedly gathered together the sand into a mound capable of burying Miss Vivi's little body. Across it he laid the opened book. At its head he placed the box of chocolates as a headstone. Then below he wrote in the sand (symbol ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... vehicle of rare meanings; but for the most part the endless alignment of monuments seemed to embody those easy generalizations about death that do not disturb the repose of the living. Glennard's eye, as he followed the way indicated to him, had instinctively sought some low mound with a quiet headstone. He had forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and with a pang he discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base of a granite shaft rearing its aggressive height at ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton

... of self-denial, the silver of white purity, the precious stones of variously-coloured and Christlike virtues? Then your work will indeed be incomplete, but its very incompleteness will be a prophecy of the time when 'the headstone shall be brought forth with shoutings'; and you may humbly trust that the day which 'declares every man's work of what sort it is' will not destroy yours, but that it will gleam and flash in the light of the revealing and reflecting fires. See to it that you are building for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... a few days longer. They laid him to rest at last in the little ground which Captain Timothy Prescott had hewn out of the forest with his axe, where Captain Timothy himself lies under his slate headstone with the quaint lettering of bygone days.—That same autumn Jethro Bass made a pilgrimage to Boston, and now Cynthia Ware sleeps there, too, beside her husband, amid the scenes she loved ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... old, had its share of promise—every grave except one. Freda came across it with a feeling of surprise. It was away down in the lower corner where there were no plots. It was shut off from the others by a growth of young poplars and was sunken and overgrown with blueberry shrubs. There was no headstone, and it looked dismally neglected. Freda felt a sympathy for it. She had no grave, and this grave had nobody to tend it or ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... "The headstone, with the foot on it, was just here," said Ned, in much perplexity, "and, as far as I can judge, the old sunken grave exactly marked out the space of ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... we found the old man kneeling on a grave before its headstone. It was a very old one, with a death's-head and cross-bones carved upon the top of it in very high relief. With his pocket-knife he was removing the lumps of green moss out of the hollows of the eyes of the carven ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald

... that a body had been washed ashore at Grave Point—the place where we bathed. We bathed there no more! How well I remember the funeral, and what a piteous sight it was afterwards to see his familiar name on a small headstone in the Old ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... and exquisite child, drew a plan for a headstone on the grave of a favorite terrier, and she had in it the words "WHO died" on such a day; the older and more worldly-minded painter put in "WHICH;" and my friend and "Bossy's" said to me, with some displeasure, as we were examining the monuments, "Wasn't he a Who as much as they?" and wasn't ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... vineyards! and what stunted little stumps with leaves round them are all these vines! Not in it with our own graceful hops. No hedges or ditches to separate one owner's property from another's. To each little or big patch of land there is a white headstone with initials on it, as if somebody had hurriedly and unostentatiously been buried on the spot where he fell, killed in the Battle of the Vineyards, by a grape-shot. At first, seeing so many of these white headstones with initials on each one, I conclude that it is some peculiar French ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 26, 1891 • Various

... step on the line which separates the ludicrous from the sublime occurs in his peroration. He makes General Joshua conquer Death by lying down and giving up the ghost, and then asks for a headstone and a foot-stone for the holy corpse. "I imagine," he says, "that for the head it shall be the sun that stood still upon Gibeon, and for the foot the moon that stood still in the valley of Ajalon." This is about the finest piece of Yankee buncombe extant. ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote

... under the bridges before Kano Ugichi returns to the bosom of his family," Conway murmured sympathetically. "He's so badly spoiled, Nick, we've decided to call him a total loss and not put up any headstone to his memory. It is Farrel's wish that the matter be ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... we're tired, my heart and I. We sit beside the headstone thus, And wish that name were carved for us. The moss reprints more tenderly The hard types of the mason's knife, As heaven's sweet life renews earth's life With which we're ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... name;" and that for the precluding of such animadversions it might behove them to provide "a buryin'" not merely decent but "very respectable whatever," and to expend the remainder of Mr. Polymathers's personality upon a headstone for his grave, and Masses for his soul. To set against these apprehensions were Mr. Polymathers's wishes and Nicholas's interests; and the longer the old man balanced them in his mind, the more perplexing became their tremulous poise. So at last, goaded by ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... inscription; here a family vault, built into the side of a mound of earth, from which only the barred iron door distinguished it; here a pedestal, with a time-worn angel holding a broken fragment of the resurrection trumpet; here a prostrate headstone, and there another bending to its fall; and among them a profusion of rose bushes, on some of which the early roses were already blooming—scarcely a well-kept cemetery, for in many lots the shrubbery grew in wild unpruned luxuriance; nor yet entirely neglected, since ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... the fork of the Kaskaskia river, where the affidavits alleged the boy was buried in 1836. The river was a muddy little brook. No grave was to be found, but some little distance away was a burying ground. I went there searching for the grave. I found it not, but lying up against a fence was a headstone having the boy's name on it, and the date ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith

... stood up and looked around, but there was no one in sight. On the other side of a holly bush, however, a number of just such roses lay on a grave. Rosalind walked over and stooped to read the name on the low headstone. "Robert Ellis Fair," she repeated half aloud as she laid her rose beside ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard

... hearth deserted now is found, Or unloved stranger-forms are circling round. In the dear hall, whose sounds were all our own, Are other voices, other accents known; And where our early friends? A starting tear And the rude headstone ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney

... flageolet over a headstone, and rolled back on the grave in a paroxysm of laughter. Above him the rooks had poured out of their nests, and were ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... with some primitive fluting, on which a stone-mason would look with much scorn, and a scratching of a galley, the symbol of the Argyll family, or some other of the races descended from ancient sea-kings. This gives encouragement, and a sharper glance around betrays a singular-looking rounded headstone, in which are two crescent-shaped holes. There are corresponding holes on the portion under the sod, which thus completes the rounded head of an ancient Scoto-Irish cross. The next point is to find the shaft—it lies not far off, deep in the turf. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... Third's time. The staircases which led to the galleries were outside, at each end of the building, and the irregular roof and worn stone steps looked grey and stained by time and weather. The grassy hillocks, each with a little upright headstone, were shaded by a grand old wych-elm. A lilac-bush or two, a white rose-tree, and a few laburnums, all old and gnarled enough, were planted round the chapel yard; and the casement windows of the chapel were made of ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... overcome; he leant upon a headstone and stared at Felix without speaking, and then it was a sort of soliloquy. 'To think of poor dear Master Eddard's son being come to that! and he looking a dozen times more like a clergyman and a gentleman than ever ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... that we should look ahead, and see nothing before us but the grave—the end of all? [Draw the grave, the headstone, and the word, "Death," with ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold



Words linked to "Headstone" :   monument, coign, grave, arch, key, memorial, tomb, building block, stone, coigne, keystone, quoin, gravestone



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