TOMBSTONE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does tombstone mean? 

• TOMBSTONE (noun)
  The noun TOMBSTONE has 1 sense:

1. a stone that is used to mark a grave

  Familiarity information: TOMBSTONE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• TOMBSTONE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A stone that is used to mark a grave

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Synonyms:

gravestone; headstone; tombstone

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 

Surely these tombstones are not all wrong? Yabblins!

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

Several characteristics of each tombstone were recorded, including rock type, length of tombstone exposure (based on date of death), direction of the sampled face (cardinal direction) and surface texture (polished or unpolished).

(Tales from the crypt: Life after death in a graveyard, National Science Foundation)

It was Tom who paid a poet from Brighton to write the lines for the tombstone, which we all thought were very true and good, beginning—

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Miss Morland has been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first, of two tombstones and a lantern—do you understand?

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

Well, what else be they tombstones for?

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

“Yes, sir,” said my uncle; “I wish no better epitaph upon my tombstone.”

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

They found that rock type is a good predictor of which microbe species grow on tombstones.

(Tales from the crypt: Life after death in a graveyard, National Science Foundation)

Between it and the town there is another church, the parish one, round which is a big graveyard, all full of tombstones.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

It was at his own very earnest request that they inscribed He fought the good fight upon his tombstone, and though I cannot doubt that he had Black Bank and Crab Wilson in his mind when he asked it, yet none who knew him would grudge its spiritual meaning as a summing up of his clean and manly life.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)