stoning

Pluralstonings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of stone.

   She spent the morning stoning olives for the tapenade.

   The angry mob was stoning the accused man at the edge of town.

   Note

   One spelling carries every verb sense of stone, so the kitchen and the mob share it. Stoning olives means pitting them, and stoning up a doorway means walling it in. The drug sense rarely shows up here, because it lives mostly in the passive (stoned). In Singapore slang, stoning is intransitive and means staring blankly when bored. Whether an object follows, and what kind, usually tells them apart, as with the punishment noun.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A form of punishment in which stones are thrown at a person, often until they die.

   The regional code still permits stoning for certain offenses, drawing international protest.

   Historians have documented stoning as a method of execution in several ancient societies.

   Note

   Capital punishment's word for death by thrown stones, with lapidation as its learned synonym. It works both ways as a noun. Uncountable, it names the method, which Iranian officials once claimed to have suspended. Countable, it names individual executions, as in Nazila Fathi's 2009 report that "the stonings came as something of a surprise." The plural marks separate events, not separate throws.

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