Quirn

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A simple hand-operated stone mill used for grinding grain into flour or meal
2. An old-fashioned handheld millstone turned by hand to crush corn or seeds into meal
3. A primitive pair of stones worked by hand to grind cereal grains into flour

Etymology: Quern is one of the oldest tools in the English vocabulary, and its name goes back to a word meaning "heavy stone." Before there were mills driven by water or wind, people ground grain between two stones, and the upper stone was the part that gave the device its name. Old English "cweorn" referred to this hand-mill and to the millstone itself, a sense that comes from a Proto-Germanic word for millstone. That ancient root, traced back to an Indo-European word for "heavy," shows up across distant languages. Swedish "kvarn" still means mill, Lithuanian "girna" and Russian "жёрнов" (žórnov) both mean millstone, and even Tocharian B, a language spoken in Central Asia and now extinct, has a cognate. The word thus describes a tool that was simply a heavy stone, and it survived in English long after mechanical mills had taken over most grinding.

Synonyms: quern