stones

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of stone.

   Workers hauled heavy stones to build the wall.

   The river bed was covered with rounded stones.

   Note

   The plural covers only the countable uses: separate pieces of rock, gems, the hard pits of fruit, stone-like deposits. The building material itself stays singular, so a wall of stone is simply made of the stuff, while a wall of stones is built from distinct pieces. As the British unit of weight the word usually stays uninflected as well: someone weighs eleven stone, not eleven stones.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of stone.

   The recipe works best if she stones the dates first.

   Each autumn he stones the plums and freezes them for winter.

   Note

   The verb form shares its spelling with the plural noun, so the grammar sorts them: she stones the dates is a verb with an object, the stones are heavy is a noun. Nearly every use is transitive, from pitting fruit to pelting someone. The cannabis sense rarely appears in this form, because it lives mostly in the passive, as in getting stoned.

3. 3
   nounslangcountable

   A man's testicles.

   He took a hard hit to the stones and doubled over in pain.

   The fighter kept his guard low to protect his stones in the clinch.

   Similarballs, nuts, testicles, bollocks

   Note

   A slang word for the testicles that is always plural, much like its near-twin balls. It belongs to casual talk, sports banter and joking, and is out of place in a medical or formal setting, where testicles is the neutral choice. The figurative sense of courage grows directly from this one, and the anatomy stays audible underneath it.

4. 4
   nounslang

   Courage; the boldness to face danger or risk.

   Few players have the stones to take that final shot with the game on the line.

   He didn't have the stones to tell his boss the project had failed.

   Similarguts, nerve, balls, courage, cojones

   Oppositecowardice, timidity

   Note

   Nerve imagined as anatomy, an extension of the testicle sense. It almost always appears in a fixed frame, have the stones to followed by a verb, and is often negated or hedged: few have the stones, he didn't have the stones. Because it is slang with a bodily image behind it, it suits casual speech and sports talk, while guts or nerve are safer elsewhere.

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