Whetstone

Sharpening stone

Sharpening stones, or whetstones, are used to sharpen the edges of steel tools such as knives through grinding and honing.

Hornfels

Hornfels is the group name for a set of contact metamorphic rocks that have been baked and hardened by the heat of intrusive igneous masses and have been rendered massive, hard, splintery, and in some cases exceedingly tough and durable. These properties are caused by fine grained non-aligned crystals with platy or prismatic habits, characteristic of metamorphism at high temperature but without accompanying deformation. The term is derived from the German word Hornfels, meaning "hornstone", because of its exceptional toughness and texture both reminiscent of animal horns. These rocks were referred to by miners in northern England as whetstones.

Whetstone (surname)

Whetstone is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:

Whetstone (benchmark)

The Whetstone benchmark is a synthetic benchmark for evaluating the performance of computers. It was first written in ALGOL 60 in 1972 at the Technical Support Unit (TSU) of the Department of Trade and Industry in the United Kingdom. It was derived from statistics on program behaviour gathered on the KDF9 computer at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), using a modified version of its Whetstone ALGOL 60 compiler. The workload on the machine was represented as a set of frequencies of execution of the 124 instructions of the Whetstone Code. The Whetstone Compiler was built at the Atomic Power Division of the English Electric Company in Whetstone, Leicestershire, England, hence its name. Dr. B.A. Wichman at NPL produced a set of 42 simple ALGOL 60 statements, which in a suitable combination matched the execution statistics.

Whetstone

Proper noun

1. A suburb and ward in the borough of Barnet, Greater London, England .
2. A large village and civil parish in Blaby district, Leicestershire, England .

Noun

1. A single instruction of the Whetstone benchmark, often expressed as a value per second.